When Mushrooms Feel Like DMT

Saturday night, I weighed out 12g of dried cubes, broke them into pieces and put them in the French press with a pint of water just off the boil. I fasted all day, so these were going to go down on an empty stomach, but at the last minute I chickened out and put the cafetiere in the fridge to chill.  I was hungover from Friday, and it was quite late, like 11pm, and I didn’t want to spend all night tripping.  I’ve never taken this amount all in one go before, and I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. So I went to bed on an empty stomach, and had the cold mushroom tea for breakfast on Sunday morning.  I ran the tea through a coffee filter before drinking it to catch any bits of mushroom, because cubes turn my stomach sometimes. 

The come up started pretty quickly, after about 15 minutes I could feel the effects starting, and I sat back and closed my eyes.  I find myself on a spiral staircase going up, but everything is bright yellow. Immediately, I can feel this trip has a strong DMT vibe, because all the colours are hyper vivid and I’ve got white text boxes bouncing around everywhere.  They don’t have a secret message, just Boom! and Kapow!, like something from a Warhol painting.  When I’m at the top of the stairs, I’m on a skyscraper looking over a city at night crowded with buildings like Manhattan or Hong Kong.  There’s all kind of weird objects flying around, human heads, and shiny things that keep changing colour.  I’m feeling a strong fun and party vibe from the whole place.  Weird heads and who knows what else keep materialising and disappearing all over the place.

Then my vision changes, and it’s like I’m looking through other people’s eyes. For a while I see snippets of everyday life from people I don’t know, there’s video images of people doing normal stuff, parking their cars, shopping etc.  Each one lasts only a few seconds, before I move onto another one.  The images dissolve into a mass of fractals, before a new video image pops back out of them.  The thought crosses my mind that maybe I’m experiencing the last thing people see before they die, but fortunately nothing like that happens, it’s just everyday life.  

Suddenly I realise that I’m really cold, like absolutely freezing. I move so that I’m sitting on the floor with my back next to the radiator, and this helps, but boy is it cold.  Even my breath is cold – when I breath onto my hands, they get colder, it’s literally ice cold.  Eventually I start to warm up, and I stand up, leaning against the wall with my legs still touching the radiator.

The next thing I see is an orangutan, all big hairy and orange.  When I send her some love, all her little babies start to materialise on her, hanging off her arms and body.  They are such little cuties.  The orangutan goes and is replaced by a chimpanzee, and the same thing happens, all her little babies start to appear on her.  I love seeing animals when I’m tripping, and these two are really cool because I’ve never seen them before. 

And then I’m on top of the walls of a castle, and there’s a bunch of gargoyles hanging out.  They have wings, black shiny bodies, maybe some claws.  They congratulate me on taking their form.  Being able to fly is pretty cool, but I’m not really sure if gargoyle is a good look for me. We fly around for a bit, and they practice throwing fireballs at me.  The fireballs were really interesting, I could catch them in a trap made of a fractal I made, with all the momentum getting absorbed by the infinite complexity of the fractal.  Last time I tripped, I had things blowing fire at me and the fire just bounced off, but this time I could catch it and make it disappear.

The next scene I’m in is something out of Ancient Egypt, with large statues everywhere, and there’s a falcon headed person there (Thoth, presumably). The rules of the game are explained to me – the greatness of every pharaoh is measured by the height of their statue.  I play the game, and stand up tall.  When I inhale and raise my shoulders, I grow tall, and with every breath I’m getting bigger and bigger.  Pretty soon, I’m absolutely enormous, bigger than all of the pharaohs. I’m honestly not too keen on this game, which to me is some kind of childish dick measuring competition, but the feeling of growing quickly is pretty amazing.

And then I’m inside a new place, a temple made of white stone with a pool of water in it.  I can’t pin down the architecture, the best I can do is appreciate that there are no arches, just cross beams. The place gets filled with bright blue and white light, and it’s coming from a person that that has long white feathers that are extending from its body.  It’s just amazing to look at, and I start to get really excited, and for the first time in the trip I have to work on calming myself down because I’m worried about getting thrown out of the place I’m in because I can’t keep my shit together.  I calm down and  it sort of acknowledges I’m there, and I start to cough up loads of phlegm which I wipe on myself.  Then I think that it’s disrespectful for me to be wearing my clothes in the presence of this awesome being, especially after I just wiped a load of gunk on them, so I yeet everything off asap. Slowly the light fades and I leave.

To this point, the whole trip had an underlying structure, like a series of tests that needed to be passed before moving onto the next one.  I would get buzzing in my ears when one was completed successfully, or would be surrounded by a bunch of text boxes saying Good Job!  All of the little scenes so far were like this, and also I had a few personal realisations along the way that also qualified.  The only one I really remember was that I committed to using my psychedelic experience or knowledge to help others.  But meeting this being was one I didn’t feel I successfully passed.

So I decided to take a break, well a cigarette break.  I roll my own, and rolling when you’re tripping is like a coordination test from hell, but one I enjoy doing.  With a job well done, I sit back and enjoy my cigarette.  I can see myself in a bar in some dirt town somewhere, maybe it’s Mexico, at least it’s a place where I don’t speak the language.  I’m holding the lighter in my hand, and because I’ve got my eyes closed again, I just drop it on the floor instead of placing it on my desk.  I imagine myself explaining to the people who are in this bar with me that I dropped the lighter because I don’t need it anymore, and it’s really heavy.  The whole place thinks that this is hilarious and bursts out laughing.  Everybody except this one dude who is standing at the back against the wall, and he takes some real offence to me dropping my lighter.  He fixes me with an evil stare, and won’t stop glaring at me.  This a bit scary, so I leave the bar.

And he starts chasing me round the town, I just can’t escape him.  Suddenly, this guy is inside my head, not just following me, and his eyes are burning red.  I’m starting to worry that I’m running into psychosis, because there’s this angry thing in my head that has taken a huge dislike to me, and it feels like it wants to hurt me.  I don’t really want to pick up the lighter, and I don’t know what to do. I’m on the verge of panicking because it’s getting very uncomfortable, so eventually I decide to pick up the lighter.  The thing is still there inside me, but slowly as I calm my mind it starts to fade away.  It feels like a lucky escape, that was not pleasant at all.

I calm myself down a bit more by meditating, just trying to empty my mind and focusing on my internal energy.  This makes me go real deep into the trip, and I start to feel my consciousness becoming like a Russian doll, or maybe some kind of crystal.  I’ve experienced something like this before on DMT, so I don’t get too freaked out.  There’s maybe 3 versions of me in there all experiencing the trip, and they also unite to present a single euphoric point of awareness.  This is fun, but it grows and grows and becomes very difficult to control and once again I start to think I’m going to totally lose the plot.  Fortunately, this little psychedelic entity spawns in front of me and starts to teach me some techniques that help me.

I get back some control, but I’m going deeper and deeper into this.  My tongue and body start spasming but I stay mentally calm and just try and observe what’s happening.  It’s not an epileptic fit, but I’ve definitely not got any control of certain parts of my body – mostly my tongue and my intestines are getting some kind of crazy work out.  After a minute of this it slowly dies down.  And then my hearing starts to go really crazy.  I get oscillating waves of noise going through my head, it feels like my ears have gone into some kind of spasm, and it’s really shaking my brain.  It’s not too much to bear, but it’s pretty close!  I do start to worry that I could be doing some serious damage to myself, but then the sounds die away and everything is calm.

At this point, I’m completely exhausted, and I go and lie down on my bed under the covers.  As I’m there, I experience waves of pleasure roll over me like I’ve never had before.  I feel too weak to even move, but I’m experiencing a state of bliss like I’ve never been close to before.  I can’t even move for at least an hour, maybe more.  It’s like every molecule of my body is in full pleasure mode.  This wasn’t the end game I was looking for, because I feel a bit like a junkie who’s just lying there doing nothing, totally consumed by the high.  I can normally control my trips to some extent by mentally squinting and adjusting things I see, but I’m totally worn out and can’t summon the energy, so I just lie back and let the pleasure wash over me.