by Malfeasinator » Thu Oct 24, 2019 4:44 am
I thought I'd share with you guys some thoughts I had when I did shrooms last month. I figure this is as good a place as any.
This is just me; your mileage may vary, as they say. It was my first time on shrooms. It won't be the last. I got the stuff from a co-worker. I had to pick it up at a bar. I actually had fun that night at the bar, as it was open-mic and some local musicians got to play, and weren't half bad. I also met a lot of interesting characters, including an old white man with long dreads, who told me his name was "Freedom." Seemed like a cool guy. There were a lot of impromptu jam sessions in the parking lot.
Anyway, I took shrooms on a full stomach. Not a lot. Not a Terrence McKenna kind of dose. Just enough. I had some Burger King around 2:30 p.m. I ingested the shrooms around 3:00, at the beach. Cortez Beach, or maybe Coquina. They're both pretty close.
The shrooms were nasty. They had the texture of really chewy popcorn and the flavor of gym socks. I still had some coke from B.K. to help chase them down, so, down the hatch they went.
I was in the water for a while, just chilling. Floating. Getting tanner. I thought maybe it would take 30 minutes or so to kick in. Nothing was happening. Around an hour in, I started seeing slight geometric visuals, nothing crazy, just like superimposed/watermark looking stuff, with my eyes closed. I thought that wasn't anything, maybe the power of suggestion and my imagination. At this point I was convinced one of three things was true: they weren't going to work, the shrooms were the wrong kind and I'd get sick or die, or they were going to work, just later than I thought.
I'd read enough bad trip reports on Erowid to know not to add more when you think it's not working. I'm thankful I followed my own advice, because right as I was leaving the beach, things started to kick in.
I was in my car, and sluggishness was the first major symptom. "Why is it so hard to put my shoes on right now? UH OHHHH..." Oh yeah. Oooooh yeah.
So. The way shrooms worked for me was I went through periods of it fucking with different parts of my brain and different senses. So at first I felt really uncoordinated and kind of drunk, but that didn't last long. Once I regained the use of my body, life was suddenly really, really hilarious. Holy shit, I'd better get home, but man, this feels awesome, is kind of how it was.
Driving was fine, except I had absolutely zero fear. Stopping was the hard part. If I stopped, it always overwhelmed me just how hilarious everything was. I tried to go through the radio stations and everything was a riot. I landed on one of the many spanish stations around here and laughed so freaking hard, especially at the repeated catchphrases.
Radio: "MAS POTENTE!"
Me: *dying*
Another symptom of the shrooms is you start noticing patterns more, or, at the very least, you start suspecting that patterns may exist, where, previously, you did not. I feel like it might be easier to learn other languages on shrooms, maybe other subjects as well, but I don't think that study will ever happen. Some song would come on and I'd only seem to notice words that I knew already and I thought I was understanding the song itself.
Anyway, I got home safe and sound. I tried to avoid everybody.
I laid on my bed and closed my eyes. I was hearing music off in the distance. It was kind of like a techno concert. With my eyes closed, I was definitely seeing a lot of fractal patterns and geometric-ish colored lines, it was like a concert of some sort just for me.
I got curious and wanted to see what else it could be like so I put Youtube up on TV. I don't know why but I chose to watch the video for Meshuggah's song "Bleed." It's normally kind of a freaky looking video, or at least that's what I think they were going for, but I laughed almost the whole way through. I was picking apart whatever they were trying to do with the symbolism, and things like that. "What were they going for? This is ridiculous", etc. "Blehhh scary music and strobe lights, bleeehhhhh."
Fedex dude came. It was a package for someone that lives here. They said "Oh! It wasn't what I thought it was!" That was a really funny thought that triggered multiple responses in my head.
Response 1: "Most things aren't."
Response 2: "What did you think it was?"
Response 3: "That's what she said."
Thinking about the way I thought about that, made me laugh.
I went through different periods of feeling different ways. There were times of feeling inspired or like I was getting information from something other than myself and I just had to let the message come through. There were a couple times where I started to panic but I was suggestible enough to tell myself it was going to be okay, and boom, it was okay.
I went through a period of being "told" I was a god so I was in control of what was happening and going on. In one of those periods, I tried to have normal conversations with people I live with. Kind of a mistake.
The pattern-seeking/pattern-believing side of me started to feel that what they were saying was a kind of rehearsed thing, like lines in a play, but also maybe just really clever improv. I felt like I was out of the loop or didn't get entirely what was going on, so I went back to my room and decided to watch some Netflix.
I put on the Kanye West episode of David Letterman's thing. I found that I could really identify with what Kanye was saying. I was like "holy shit, what if it's like he's on shrooms but all the time? That would be rough."
Shrooms gave me a gift for bad poetry. Here's some of the less embarrassing stuff that I will share with you all:
trying to find a meaning
a way through the ceiling
we
are
all trapped in the same room
life the universe everything
just repeating
the message is that we're all dying
all of us over and over
there's no way through
we should love each other while we're still here
we are the same as the people we hate
we are the same as the people who hate us
Some of that came from the feelings and visuals I got in my setting, my room. The popcorn on the ceiling started looking like the surface of the moon very slowly, very gradually. I started seeing other things, too, like the ceiling starting to bubble up like cooking caramel, and what looked like there might be a passage beyond, a portal of some kind, if I could just break through the surface.
I had periods of empathy for people, and thinking about where Kanye was at with his mental illness reminded me of all the times I'd fucked with people when they were high or on psychedelics (I was a dumb teenager), and I was like "Oh, man, I was not cool. I was a real bully." I realized that I was like a copy of my granddad because that's all I knew how to be, that really, back then, I was just lashing out in fear at a world I didn't understand.
There were other periods where it just felt like I had a really strong buzz, akin to being drunk on alcohol. I could feel it in the back of my neck. I started referring to it as being "plugged in to the Matrix."
My general regular goofiness that I exude in my normal every day life somehow kind of hid the way I was from people. Nobody thought I was a different Dan that day. That gave me a lot to ponder. I wanted to tell people I was on shrooms and had to fight that urge a few times.
I also realized in the moments of being out of it, that the normal everyday way I was living was making life difficult for myself in the shroom state (and normal states). The lockscreen on my laptop is very colorful and visual and holy shit it was starting to melt and merge and look AWESOME but how the hell am I going to type when I feel like I need to stare at this? I wondered about the psychedelic visuals out there and asked myself if they were traps or if they helped facilitate "the download" of knowledge that seems to come pouring in?
[maybe the download is an infinite journey. maybe we can never reach the end. maybe the best we can do is reach out and try to grab as much of it was we can]
Also, typing was weird. It just felt weird to like, drag my arm through the air and make my fingers land on keys. In retrospect, I know that's not how typing normally works. Just sending a regular message of any kind, even texting on my phone, took many times longer than it had to be. I'd keep having new things to think about but I wanted to type out the old ones first. Very distracting, that.
The whole shroom experience started to wind down around 9:30 or so. Things became less and less intense until I was just more of myself. I felt great. I could hold normal conversations again.
The next day I felt wiped out, though. Just, like, super hung over. Very tired. Took me a while to wake up, but food, caffeine, and sugar helped get my brain going again.
Looking back now, I can see how psychedelics can really change how people think. It's like your brain is in debug mode and a jolly prankster is messing with your settings. There were brief moments where I'd feel like I had never been alive until that very moment, like it was some kind of accomplishment that I finally got there. Sometimes things like the sluggishness would come back, just all at random, like switches were being flicked on and off. The power of telling myself I'm okay seems to work wonders at times like those.
I feel like I can see how the hippies believed in peace and love, but in my sober state I felt sorry for them because the world was never going to agree with them. Like I might agree on some level that I'm the same as a person who doesn't like me, but the person that doesn't like me isn't going to know that or feel the way I do, and just trying to get along isn't always going to do me any favors in the real world.
Overall though, the trip was cool. I'm going to do it harder next time, I just need some free time, some alone time, where I can be sure things will be positive.
It's been about a month now. My next experience will be acid. I might have to take that with a friend. We'll see how that goes.