My first Mushroom Trip and Dark Side of The Moon

This was back somewhere between 2003 and 2004. My friends had all done mushrooms at this point except me and by "my friends' I mean the smaller group of my friends and I who thought we were invincible and were experimenting with drugs pretty regularly at the time. I was 20 years old. So, I was bugging my friend R to get us some shrooms to do. He was the guy who knew the guy. We all knew the guy, but you know how it is. "The guy" who was basically just another kid like us wants to sell drugs, but also doesn't want everybody to know and will only sell to certain people, blah, blah blah. That old chestnut lol. Anyway, I bugged my friend for like weeks, or maybe months when finally he told me he got an eighth and we would each do half. He had done it before so he was my "shaman" and I was nervous, but not quite the anxious person I am today. I was drinking a lot back then and smoking pot very regularly. So I was PUMPED! 

Now, there was the issue of when and where. We could not do it at our homes, because...parents. And I was living in a dorm and figured doing mushrooms in a dorm with 7 other drunk 20 year olds would have been a hellish nightmare. I would have been right BTW. So, we decided to splurge. We rented a hotel room at a decent hotel and planned it out for a short weekend. Like a Friday night and then check out Saturday morning kind of deal. So, we booked the room bought supplies. Supplies: 2 gallons of water and I think maybe some food and a little boom box and a CD of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I think we had this whole plan of eating the shrooms then listening to the album which would make it cooler. It did, but I'll get to that. 

At the time I was in a relationship and lied about where I was and what I was doing. This little lie would nearly ruin my trip, but I'll get to that in a bit as well. So, we get to the room and we prepare. There was two beds, one for him and one for me. We brought our stuff in and set it up. I placed the boom box on the floor and put the cd in, not playing it, but getting it ready. We sat and bullshitted for a bit probable because I was nervous. Then he split it up. I think I got 1 or two caps, a stem or 2 and crumbs and he got about the same maybe a little more. We did not mix it up with anything. I just put it in my mouth and chewed it up. It reminded me in taste and texture to the wafer you get at a catholic mass for communion. Honestly. It didn't taste too bad or good. I remember picking chunks out of my teeth. I ate it and washed it down with some water. I took off my shoes and we both started watching South Park. 

I had never taking any psychedelics before and heard about what it was like what didn't really know what to expect. So I was kind antsy. I was waiting for something to happen and I had heard it could take like an hour or so to feel anything. We were sitting there watching TV with the lights on and just laughing, I was laughing a little nervously because as I said I was nervous and "waiting" with anxiety and anticipation. During the episode I remember thinking "this isn't funny" I started to not like the cartoon which at the time I really loved a lot. It just seemed weird, not just the fact tat t was a cartoon, but the idea that we were watching this TV thing to entertain us, etc. It just seemed weird and fake. I started to not like it and I wanted to turn it off so I did. I remember the first thing that "changed" after we turned off the TV was my depth perception. I was feeling uncomfortable and I got up to go into the bathroom to take a piss and when I walked into the bathroom and closed the door it was dark and then I turned on the light. It was like being instantly placed into another realm, like this new room and the room I just left were so very, very different. This room was all white. White and bright. I remember there was a giant mirror over the sink and another mirror on the back of the bathroom door, so when I hit the lights I could see the back of myself reflecting off the door and into the mirror over the sink and it legitimately took me a minute or so to find my face. I saw the back of myself and was trying to move around to find the front of myself and i had to move my head and my eyes and find my face. When I did I remember staring at myself for a while, not sure how long but I was wearing contacts and my pupils were so huge and I could see this fake things on my eyes. They looked yellow-y and weird, or wrong. I had to take them out and put my glasses on because my eyes were getting dry from staring in the mirror lol. So I did that then I had to pee. Peeing was weird. I did do it but it just felt weird and looked weird and made me laugh a little, to myself. I was not very giggly or anything just kind of astonished at things. So I pulled myself together and shut the light and opened the door to the bathroom back into the hotel room. The hotel room was a different kind of light, that worm lamp light, kind of orange-y. 

The first thing I noticed when I stepped back into this room was that the side of the room I was standing on seemed smaller, the ceiling seemed te be so close to my head and face and the ceiling ALLLL the way on the other side of the room which was probably 15 feet away was like so tall and higher. My friend at this point realized I was feeling it and started to laugh. He stood up and it seemed like he was tiny and the ceiling was so high above his head. Then I turned off the lights in the room, I don't remember why. Maybe he asked me to but I did it and then the whole room "changed" it looked and felt so different and we both laughed. So then I turned the lights on again and then turned them off, on and off, on and off. We laughed. Then I remember laid down while I was doing this and was just laughing. Then I asked him to come to the light switch so that i could lay down and see how cool it looked while he turned them off and on again. We did this for a a few minutes. The difference between the lit room and the dark room was cool we thought lol. Then I really started to feel different. So I suggested we turn the lights off all together, but it was too dark which sucked so we put on the hotel channel. That channel on the hotel TV that is silent with just some text and a photo of some smiling woman. It was perfect. It lit up the room just enough but it was too bright. 

I think it was at this point that we started playing the album. Just put it on repeat. Low, not too loud. Then we both laid on beds and stared at the ceiling in silence. I remember the ceiling. It was like that stucco stuff, kind of textured paint over tiles. It had the lines of tiles but these little bumps and created little tiny shadows on the ceiling. I was staring at all these lines and watched them take shape. One after another, and the shapes would form actual configurations. Sometimes images and sometimes geometric patterns and they would kind of pop out and move towards me in the dim light. It was cool and then it wouldn't stop and it got a little over whelming so I shut my eyes and as soon as I did that the gray blackness of the inside of my eyelids started to take shape with the music. Instantly the shallow black background became deep and endless and then it became silver-y and metallic looking like the inside of a spaceship or something and then all these shapes and patters starting forming and moving to the beat of the music all bouncing around. It was like a silver background with green triangles "holding" purple rectangles bopping to the music. All of that happened in about a second and I opened my eyes again almost out of breath. It was becoming "too much" or so I felt for a few minutes. I didn't want to say anything so I kept quite and just started to embrace it, I think. I remember a this point laying on the bed and then holding my arm up over my head with a fist to see what it looked like in the dim light and it was as if my arm wasn't connected to my body. It was like a cartoonish cut out against the ceiling and I stared at it for a while, not sure how long. It was just about this time that my friend got up and walked right out of the room. 

This FREAKED ME OUT! In an instant I was up and opened the door to see where he was going. All these thoughts rushed through my brain, I thought" "OH MY GOD HE'S HAVING A BAD TRIP AND HE'S WALKING TOWARDS THE FRONT DESK TO TELL THEM HE'S FREAKING OUT AND NEEDS HELP!" I was thinking that if he's freaking out and he's the more experienced one and he's kinda spotting me then I'm going to freak out too and we're going to get in trouble and loss our minds etc lol. So, I popped my head out of the door and began to call out his name, but he ignored me which made me think "yes, all of my thoughts are right and he is freaking out" so I called his name a few more times and as I was the hallway began to move. This hallway was perfect for a mushroom trip. The walls and rug were this deep blue. The floor and two thick white lines along the sides with big white polka dots in the middle with white and blue striped wall paper on the walls. It looks as though the walls were moving in and out as if they were breaking and the floor seemed to be rolling like waves but somehow i stepped out of the room, in my socks that were kind of falling off my feet like some little kid. I called out his name again as he reached the front desk just as he was about to speak to the overnight security guard and he turned and said "WHAT!??" which stopped me in my tracks because it was clear in that instant that he was not freaking out and I had created this whole fear in my mind. I asked what he was doing and he said he was breaking some dollars for quarters so he could go to the vending machine because he wanted chips. HAHAHA. I felt so much better, but was also like "how the hell are you hungry right now?" 

So, he got his chips and I calmed down. He was laughing as he entered the room and then I started laughing too. Mostly because I felt better knowing we were not going to have a bad night and get into trouble and have to deal with people in this state and also because I was creeping after him in the hallway looking clearly like someone who was "on drugs" lol. We talked about how he was ok and he was tripping but he could turn it "on and off" and I was like ok and pretty much after having that short conversation I was good too. I was "in it" but really calm. He ate his chips and then we turned the lights back off and he laid on his bed and I laid back on mine and we laid there in silence listening to Pink Floyd having our own personal little trips. I was really into the ceiling lol and the painting over my bed. You know, hotel art. A painting of flowers and a little pond or a lake with a tiny boat all the way in the background like on top of the painting. Only for me the flowers were very colorful and iridescent and moving as if a breeze was brushing over them and the water seemed to ripple with the wind and the little boat bounced. The Painting seemed alive. I would go back and forth between the painting, the ceiling and the thick dark green curtains that hung by the window. We had the window cracked open a little bit and as the wind would pass through them they would move a little and they looked like the emerald city. A few hours ago they were just drab green curtains and now it seemed as if they were the color of royal green or something and the threading in them sparkled in the TV light like little emeralds. It was beautiful. It was right about this time that my phone rang. At the time I had one of those Nokias the "new" one, the one without the thick antenna on top and it didn't had that green pixilated screen, this was the new hotness, the one with the brighter "bluish" screen lol So I grabbed it, wishing and wondering why I didn't turn it the fuck off and saw that it was my girlfriend. I knew I had to pick it up because even though I told her I was staying at R's house if I didn't pick it up and just shut it off she would call me 1000 times and maybe even contact my friend or my family and I imagined this manhunt looking for me so I just picked it up. As soon as she started talking I knew I had to say as little as possible and just get her off the phone. I could hear her but really all I could focus on was the "sound" of her voice coming out of that little speaker near my ear. It was like machinery. Like the "wa-wa-wa" from the adults in the Peanuts cartoon. All she wanted to do was call me to say goodnight, so we said our goodnights and I hung up and shut it off and placed in the in the end table drawer next to the bible. At this point it started to bug me because I had lied to her about where I was and what I was doing. I knew if I had told her I was going to a hotel to eat mushrooms she would freak out and maybe let me do it or maybe try to stop me and just knowing she was out there being mad at me would have freaked me out so I lied. At the time she barely even smoked a tiny hit of weed so I knew I had to, but it did feel bad for a little bit. I discussed it with my friend for a bit then laid back down and dove back into the ceiling. 

At this point Dark side of the moon had played on repeat quite a few times, maybe 5 or 6, maybe more I'm not quite sure and me and my friend would come out of our trips by commenting on certain songs. IT was playing low but it seemed to fill the inside of my head and I assume the inside of his head as well. When "The great gig in the sky" would start one of us or both of us in unison would say "here she comes" because that song was just so amazing to the trip. He voice was awesome. Then maybe we would chat for a minute or so about what we were thinking or seeing, etc. Sharing trip experiences then we would say "ok bye" and go back into out own little worlds. 

After a while it was less about visuals or what I was seeing but what I was "seeing" or feeling inside of my head. It's gotten fuzzy over the years but I remember being able to go through my memories like a filing cabinet. Childhood memories, things I thought I completely forgot would show up in full vivid detail like a lucid dream and I wa staring at my little self in the playpen with my cousin when we were like 1 or 2. I could see the room, my grandma's old furniture and hear the conversation that was going on in the room and here the TV playing. I could see all of my family as their younger selves. I still think about it to this day. It was nuts and beautiful and amazing. I think I was getting a little teary eyed about it at the time. It felt so good and cool to be able to do this. 

We did this for hours. Sitting quietly in our own trips then stopping to discuss it for a bit then going back into it. We planned on doing them again, but I never have. I really want to but as time went on I even stopped smoking pot. It made my anxiety so bad and it was in college that I realized that I had anxiety and how it was affecting me. Throughout my 20's my anxiety got worse and worse so I never did mushrooms again. Now I'm 35 and I really want to but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't really anxious about, which is why I haven't done it. I want to and think I maybe could but I'm afraid if I do my anxiety will rear it's ugly head and send me into a 6 hour panic attack. What do you think? 

Thanks for reading!

Lou