Reality completely shattered

The trip started off really positive overall, with the most “psychedelic” open-eyed visuals I’ve ever gotten from mushrooms. Everything seemed to be leaking/dripping vibrant neon colors, especially the trees. The colors started to intensify and it felt like everything around me was made up of light. Sometimes when blinking I’d see patterns of neon colors mixed together, almost like how different colors of paint would look when mixed together in a pan, but much more translucent and fluid than that. This eventually turned into seeing sounds and emotions as colors which lasted for basically the rest of my trip. Every emotion seemed to have different colors associated with it, and they were all beautiful, even the colors that were associated with negative feelings. My feelings of sadness were darker blues and green, while easier emotions were usually more similar to yellow, pink, or orange. Sometimes when my husband would talk there would be a colored aura associated with certain words or phrases that he would say, and I’d see the colors appear slightly above his head. These were often rainbow types of colors as he was telling me about an energetic field that he thought he was tapping into during his own experience. Toward the beginning of the trip as some of the effects were still increasing I had a profound sense of what felt like “home”. We don’t really have the right word to describe what it felt like, but home is probably the best I can come up with. All I knew was that this energetic state I found myself existing in was what I belong to, and that this place will always be there waiting for me. I knew for sure that this place would still exist even when not under the influence of psychedelics, and that I could tap into it at any time if I really wanted to. This feeling then led to a strong appreciation for my husband, my dogs, my backyard, and all of nature - it was almost as if I was feeling love for these things for the very first time, they all felt so novel and exciting. I knew that these things are all that really matters in life, and that this energetic state I was experiencing was the most “real” or “true” state I could possibly be in. The feeling of absolute realness started to consume me in an ecstatic way.. I had never felt so much peace in my life. I knew for sure that what I was feeling was more true and real than my normal day to day life. I felt aware that my typical model of reality is really just my own creation, and that it is mostly a false one. I started to gain an awareness of new dimensions at this thought - it felt so profound that I could be a part of this higher state, while knowing that I typically operate within a less informed or distorted state, and I realized that I was essentially still imbedded within that lower state at the same time as being aware of this higher state. It was as if I was in 2 places at once, although when I had this thought a diagram looking visual appeared above me that somehow gave me the impression that I was in more than just 2 places, but several more places all imbedded within each other. It felt like I was perceiving extra dimensions that exist but I can’t even describe or remember them clearly at this point. All I know is that it felt so silly to me that some humans think all of this is just generated by our brain (a question I often had in the past). Our brains truly felt pea sized compared to what actually exists, and the very notion that our brains could just be creating all of this felt like such a limited and funny human-centric view. A little bit later I ended up seeing myself in the mirror, and as I stared at my face my skin looked really aged and worn out. It was very clear to me that the dryness and wrinkle lines I was seeing were all direct results of stress and life energy being sucked from me. I realized that all forms of stress or mental pain manifest in our physical bodies and this is a huge part of what ages and ills us, and it felt like I was receiving this insight that we should always make sure to do enough things that give life energy to us rather than drain it from us. I felt pretty sure that the key to a healthy life is making sure we do more things that promote life energy than things that drain or take away life energy, and if we always maintain this balance we will always be happy and healthy. Shortly after this I started to have some dark scary thoughts that felt like realizations about my own unhealthy behaviors. I was forced to look at this behavior and I felt sickened by it and somewhat trapped/doomed. Around the same time my dog (who currently has a slipped disc in his back) started to get worse with his pain - the pain suddenly amplified and he seemed so terrified and helpless. My husband who was also on a higher dose of mushrooms became very consumed with and upset about my dog’s condition, and being in the extremely uneasy and vulnerable state that I was in it caused me to absorb both my dog and husband’s pain/uneasiness along with my own, and this all seemed to have spiraled me out of control. I felt panic rising up inside me and I was trying to latch on to whatever I could to stay in this world but it was no use. Meditating didn’t work, telling myself I was ok didn’t work, and suddenly reality as I knew it completely shattered. Everything looked extremely alien and unfamiliar and it was terrifying. I didn’t recognize my surroundings at all, everything was so distorted and warped and folded in on itself. I felt like I was suffocating and needed to escape, but I knew that there was no way out, and I was getting progressively more horrified as I lost my sense of self. I was no longer me - I was extremely disassociated and so far gone into what felt like an endless state of doom. Nothing around me felt like it normally did, and I found myself sitting on my kitchen floor crying, desperately trying to make the kitchen feel more familiar again but I couldn’t. I was convinced that I could no longer be a functional member of society and was sure that I was going to end up in an insane asylum. No matter how much my husband tried to reassure me that I was going to come back and be ok again it was so hard to believe him. He told me that I was experiencing a mushroom trip but I wasn’t so sure of that, because if that was the case I didn’t get why this was only happening to me and not him, given that he was on an even larger dose than I was. I felt myself latch on to him emotionally, and I’ve never felt so vulnerable and exposed in my entire life. I had to just trust that he was right and I was wrong, and that was so scary given how sure I felt that I was losing my mind for good. He was my only anchor keeping me in this world, and his words had the ability to reassure me for maybe 5 seconds at a time before I found myself lost in an endless thought loop of fear again. This cycle continued for what felt like hours, but I’m not actually sure how long it really lasted. After some time the effects finally started to subside, and I felt like I was witnessing my brain reconstruct my normal model of the world again which was remarkable. I literally saw the room reconstructing itself almost as if it were made up of complex puzzles pieces. I had the most powerful sense of relief, and was so grateful to be back to myself again. Recognizing what had just happened to me and how much I needed and relied on the love from my husband was the most humbling experience of my life. I don’t know what I would have done had he not been there for me to grip on to. We connected over how the most powerful thing in existence is our capacity for love and connection with one another. I was also able to see so clearly that as humans we all need to expose what is going on inside of us in order to form deeper, more authentic, and more empathetic connections with each other. This ended up springing me into an extreme state of bliss, and I couldn’t believe that just a little while prior I had been desperately grasping for my sanity and begging for normalcy. This state of bliss was followed by several beautiful realizations about the nature of our existence - most of them ineffable. I couldn’t stop crying tears of joy and I somehow had the sense that I needed to go through that dark, scary experience in order to gain the beautiful realizations I had afterwards. Later on after the most powerful effects had passed, I unexpectedly uncovered some trauma from my childhood that I didn’t realize was still inside me after all these years. I realized I never properly mourned the unexpected loss of my grandma when I was 12 because I was trying to hold it together for my mom at the time, and that all the forms of emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical abuse that I experienced from my mom for several years after the death of her mother was all related to her own pain. The realization that it wasn’t my fault and that nothing was actually wrong with me as a daughter was incredibly freeing, in ways that I didn’t even know I was still in need of after all this time. The sudden, new found level of understanding and empathy I felt for my mom despite the way she treated me brought me to tears. I finally understood why everything went the way it did, and why I was such a trigger for her, and yet I didn’t feel any guilt, shame, or anger over any of it. Just a strong urge to connect with her and tell her that I love and appreciate her. All in all this trip was a fucking roller coaster. In some ways it was the most profound, beautiful, and enlightening experience of my life, while in others it was the most terrifying, disturbing and thought provoking experience of my life. I’m still piecing everything together and I know I’ll be working through this one for awhile, but writing it all down is my first step toward sorting through the different components.