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Going Beyond Reality
Mushrooms - P. cubensis
Citation:   Tizool. "Going Beyond Reality: An Experience with Mushrooms - P. cubensis (exp30939)". Erowid.org. Jul 7, 2006. erowid.org/exp/30939

 
DOSE:
4.5 g oral Mushrooms - P. cubensis (dried)
  10 hits smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 125 lb
The day started at 10 in the morning. I went over to my guitarists house, drumsticks in hands, mushrooms in pocket. I also had my digital camera and a small baggie of very potent weed that I had acquired. The day had already proved to be pretty good.

Upon arrival, I set up my gear and got ready to play music (I had heard that mushrooms greatly enhance the creative side, especially musically, but had yet to try it – today was the day). My bassist arrived and began to set up his gear. The singer was due to arrive an hour and a bit later. We decided to eat without him and wait for him to come. Then he could eat them, and since it wasn’t going to be a big trip, it wouldn’t really matter that we ate them first.

I chewed up the mushrooms with my two friends and swallowed them, almost throwing up. Mushrooms do not taste good, to me. They are quite hard to get down because my body didn’t recognize them as food, so instantly tried to gag them up. After eating, we quickly went upstairs, got the bong ready, and took upwards of 10 huge hits (just my normal since mushrooms aren’t very strong).

After smoking, I immediately began to feel the affects. Whether it was mental or physical, I’m not sure, but I definitely felt much different then just being high on weed. There was a weird twist to everything around me. My thought patterns were altered so that when I thought of one idea, hundreds more would rush through my mind. It was quite overwhelming, but I decided that music would fix it. After all, music fixes everything.

We went downstairs to our ‘studio’ and I immediately began to play. Nothing could stop me. I sat down on my drum stool, and by just looking at the drums, I was sucked up and thrown into them. At the beginning, it was very similar to normal jam sessions on marijuana, but again with that weird twist. The black light that was shining on my hi-hats (the cymbals that close on each other) seemed to ripple each time I hit them. As soon as my bassist and guitarist were ready, we began to play.

My bassist and I began on a similar feel of music. Kind of a dark-rock mixed with funk. It was quite good, I must say. Because of the mushrooms, I had the ability to simply listen to the music as if I weren’t playing it and noticed how much differently we were all playing. Instead of the normal, constrained 4/4 music that we were used to, we were all adding beats and dropping beats and changing time signatures and dynamics as if we were one being. Never before had I been so connected with the music. I began to cry behind the drums because I was filled with the utmost sense of joy.

Now things start to get weird. I look behind me and see the wall falling in on me. I jump, as does my bass player and guitarist, and it becomes part of the music. I begin to daze, and simply stare at my ride cymbal. I look into it and see profound and detailed patterns that move with the music. I become entranced by these patterns and have a feeling of being ‘lost’ within them. Unable to pull my gaze away from the patterns, I try to look at my fellow trippers but am unable too. So beautiful are these patterns that I simply can’t look away. So, instead, I go into my bassist’s mind. That’s right, into his mind. I go there and know exactly what he is thinking, what he is doing, and what he is seeing as well (which wasn’t much at this point. My bag of mushrooms had an extra gram than theirs, so I was tripping a lot harder).

The music starts speeding up as I begin to understand what is happening. I’m still lost in the patterns, but my mind has come back to the plain of the music, and I realize that for a point there, I was not in control of my body, yet the music still went on. It was as if the music were playing me, because even now, I could not comprehend what my limbs were doing. Never before had I been able to play like this. Playing in time signatures such as 15/8 had been impossible for me before having only played drums for about 3 years. Now that seemed simple. We were playing in half beats, and then throwing shot notes in the weirdest places, not even consciously thinking about it. This blew my mind. I couldn’t come close to understanding what was at work here.

As the music sped up, so did my mood. Instantly, it went from enormous joy to extreme confusion, doubt, fear, anxiety, and restlessness. The patterns shifted from playful, jumpy, beautiful patterns to menacing, dark, rigid patterns. I stopped playing, stood up and went to sit in front of my drum-kit. My trip-mates followed, putting down their instruments and sitting. The guitarist left his flanger pedal on, and the room was filled with moving white noise. I could actually see the flanger, and anyone who has experienced this will know exactly what I mean. The walls bent in and out, my friends bent and shifted, and my own soul changed shape and swelled or collapsed with the sound of the flanger. I saw everything turn into 2-d figures with thick, straight black outlines in a 3-d environment. Looking at myself, every bit of detail was condensed into simple, solid colours with black outlines. Obviously, I was fucked. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t handle this. But, I reassured myself, it would be over soon. Yeah right….

10 minutes later, I saw my guitarist morph into a frog like being as he shook on the floor, constantly yawning. I asked him to stop, but he couldn’t understand. His trip was beginning to turn on him to. My bassist uttered the words “this is a life experience…” That was the most anyone had said in over 20 minutes. Thinking of that, my mind was plunged into an infinite number of thoughts. The strangest thing about that was the fact that I understood every single thought to it’s entirety, yet could not comprehend any of them at the same time. It was as if my mind (not my brain) was split in two.

One was the one at one with the universe, and the other was the one observing the universe. I had one part of my mind go beyond this world, while one stayed and lived here. The mix of these two showed me some profound thoughts that I still cannot make much sense of, but has changed me more than anything else in the world.

I decided we should go watch some TV. TV’s real, I told myself. Upstairs is real… Or is it? I wasn’t sure anymore. Was I real? Are you real? What is real? Where is real? How are we real? Those are only a small number of thoughts running through my head into oblivion.

Walking up the stairs was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hung onto the banister for dear life, fearing that I would fall down the endless flight of stairs when I had really only climbed one or two. Walking upstairs was incredible, because instead of the dark, dim mood of the studio downstairs, the upstairs was filled with sunshine of a bright summer morning. This brought my mood up a lot, simply seeing one aspect of nature. My biggest mistake, and I see it now, was simply that I stayed inside. Had I run out that door, ran into the forest across the street and tripped there, I would have had a much better time.

We went into the TV room and sat down. We turned the TV to the discovery channel. On the TV showed a motorcycle with a rocket engine attached to it and some other bozo trying to break the land-speed record. I thought, how can I trip out on this? All I wanted was for it to stop, but I still wasn’t even close to my peak. Watching that TV show was the most retarded experience of my life so far. I looked at my bassist, he looked at me, and we both had the most puzzled looks on our faces. I was tripping out so hard simply watching a show about a motorcycle. The words coming from the TV altered themselves as I listened, hearing them distort and twist and bend. The image stayed concrete, but that was the weirdest thing in my sight range because everything else was moving. The fact that the one image on the TV looked normal was frightening. What does TV do that my mind doesn’t alter it? What is TV that something so divine as a mushroom can’t work on it? I began to fear the TV, but was entranced by it. Not until my guitarist said he wanted some water did I snap out of it. Yes. Water, I told myself. Water fixes everything.

We went into the kitchen and I sat down on a chair. The drug was still rising, and over half an hour ago I was already scared. Now add another hour to that fear, and that was me sitting in the chair in the kitchen. I began to feel disconnected with reality. I could move my body, but everything seemed so far away, as if being pulled away from me. I stayed in the same place, but reality was filtered through a small hole in my vision. Everything, including sound, went into this hole, and I saw, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled it going in there. Then, as if out of nowhere, I was the happiest person in the world. I was so happy that I again began to cry, and didn’t know what to do I was so happy. This was by far the best feeling I had ever experienced.

Then, just as quickly as it had arisen, it was gone. Back to reality, and there I was on the floor, with my guitarist and bassist standing over me and hitting my face. Apparently, I had passed out and landed head first on the tile floor where I continued to violently shake for 20 seconds. My shirt and face was wet from where my guitarist had thrown his water on my to try to wake me up. Shit, I thought. I want to go back. I began to explain that sense of wonderful happiness, but they couldn’t listen. They were very scared now, since that could happen to them at any time. I told them I had taken more, it wasn’t going to happen. But it was too late. They had the fear. No way to get rid of that once it set in.

We moved to the floor near the entrance to the kitchen and sat for who knows how long (my sense of time was gone). After what seemed like an eternity of shifting tiles and vibrating patterns, my bassist explained to me how he thought I had died and was more terrified then he had ever been in his life. He kept asking me if I was ok, and I kept saying yes, but he kept asking. This brought me into frustration and fear a little more because I didn’t know if I was all right. I didn’t know if was going to be ok. I might die, I thought, and what happens if I do? I leave that burden on these guys? They have to tell everyone how we had overdosed on mushrooms? Fuck… what a mind job.

The moments right after this are a little hazy. I remember going upstairs because we thought it would be more comfortable. I don’t remember going upstairs, but came back into reality sitting on the floor in my guitarist room. Everything was still moving around me, and I had a great feeling of fear. The carpet felt very strange to me, as if it became part of my hand as it was on top of it. My guitarist was now at the point that he couldn’t understand language, so I gave up trying to talk to him. He simply asked questions about what I meant, not being able to even comprehend his own name, or the sense of this reality. My bassist, as I would later learn, was close to his level, but not as much. Neither of them had visual hallucinations, but simply had the sense that nothing was real and that nothing made sense. My trip had taken a different direction.

Looking around the room, I began to focus on feelings in my body. When I thought of a part of my body, my consciousness would become that part. For example, I thought of my mouth and then I was only my mouth and the rest of my body was gone. I did this for an eternity in my time, since time was gone for me. I had no idea what year it was, let alone when we took the mushrooms. I thought I had been high for generations, for an eternity.

After I shifted my consciousness around my body, I saw my teeth come out of my mouth. At first, they were the exact same shape that they would be in my mouth, but then they parted into separate pieces and flew away. The same happened with my fingernails and all the hair on my body. I began asking my bassist if he was alright. The words came out but talking without teeth is quite hard to get used too. He replied ‘Yes, but then….’ And that was it. Just those three words, but from that, I spoke to him forever. Neither of us said a word, but there was a mutual understanding of an hour long conversation that happened somewhere between this world and the mushroom world. We did this many times throughout the trip, but that’s the only one I really remember well.

I began to not be able to control my eyelids. I was also very cold. Remember that this is summer, and that all the windows were open in the room, yet I was shivering under three blankets. I closed my eyes and drifted. I drifted for so long that I forgot I was drifting. It was nothingness basically. There was absolutely nothing around me. I could sense nothing at all, so there was no reality for me at this point. This went on again for an eternity (I’m using that word a lot, but it really was an eternity. I lived an infinite number of lives through this trip.)

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Being the only one being able to comprehend reality at this point with my eyes opened, I rushed downstairs and opened the door, hoping that the person that was knocking would be real. And there he was. My prophet, at that point. For the last hour, my bassist and I had been saying “our singer’s coming. He’s real.” That was our mantra that was keeping us sane. So, when he came, a huge wave of relief washed over me as I saw his realness. But, it didn’t last for long. He stepped into the house, and before his shoes were off, he wasn’t real. I can’t explain how it feels to know that nothing around me is real, but it wasn’t welcome to me at this point in time. I told him not to eat the mushrooms, that he should learn from me, and made him promise to never touch these evil things in his entire life. I promised that to myself to but quickly broke the promise in less then 2 months, realizing that these are not evil, but that I was merely not ready.

So, we went back upstairs to find my guitarist convulsing on the ground in what seemed like a seizure. I took him and shook him, and he stopped convulsing and simply laid there with his eyes closed. I decided to do the same. For the next while, I was on the floor with my eyes closed suffering the most intense hallucinations in the world. My mind was filled with voices and weird, flowing and infinite snake like beings that wrapped around my existence only to show that the rest of it’s infinite form was holding onto an ethereal being far from me. Each time this happened, I was connected with that being for a short while, until the snake moved somewhere else. There were thousands of these snakes, and an even greater number of beings in this foreign realm. After being in there for what seemed like forever, I opened my eyes and asked how long I’d been asleep. My singer replied “2 minutes.” I was astounded. 2 minutes? That was a lifetime…

So, I closed my eyes again. This time, I saw my body then I saw it break apart and scatter into the sea of snakes. FUCK, I thought, not knowing where my body was. I had to find it. I felt inconceivably vulnerable without my body, and finding it was my first priority. It was very hard since that snakes continuously tried to wrap around my form (which I guess they could see, but to me didn’t exist). After running into millions of snakes and beings, I found a part of my body. I had to do this 25 times, since my body split into 25 parts.

Now came the tricky part. I had to put my body back together. It was like a 3-D biological puzzle. After a long time, I put it back together, only to be faced with another problem. I wasn’t inside the body. How would I put my incredibly expanded consciousness inside the body that would no longer hold it? I ‘sat’ there (use the term sat lightly since I had no physical form) forever testing how I could go back inside. Finally, I found it. There is a part in my brain that is somewhat like a passageway. I traveled into that passageway and suddenly, my eyes were open and I was still in the room.

I started screaming for 10 seconds. My singer rushed over and asked what was wrong, and I replied to him, “I know exactly how I exist…” and smiled. He couldn’t possibly understand, so I asked him how long it had been since I last asked him the same question. He looked at his watch and replied “2 and a half minutes.”

I closed my eyes once more, but this time didn’t see any snakes. I saw four different paths this time, each one glowing a different colour. I will give the closest estimates I can to these colours, but I hadn’t seen them before. One was a mix of purple and red, the other red and blue, the third white and yellow, and the last is indescribably by these means. Again, those are estimates and don’t come close to the colours I saw.

I traveled down the purple-red one first. As I went there, I was transported to another realm of existence. I can’t remember exact details of this existence, but it was similar to ours except that everything had a slight bend to it that wouldn’t make physical sense in our reality. In this realm, my entity was focused on one being. For the longest time, I questioned why I couldn’t move away from this being, but then realised that it was me, but in another reality. I looked long and hard at the being who’s physical form greatly differed from mine, but who’s energy patterns (which I was now seeing everywhere) was exactly the same. Just then, I was back at the crossroads… Now there were only three roads.

I traveled down the second path, and was confronted with a similar situation. The same thing happened, but I began to notice more similarities about the beings. They all had the same eyes. Third and fourth road were different realities but no new revelations. I had now seen myself in four different forms.

I opened my eyes and immediately asked the time. “2 minutes you fucking retard” was the response. I began to laugh so hard that I couldn’t breathe. Wow, I thought. Time doesn’t exist. Since then, I have never worn a watch or regarded time as something concrete, since I can now bend it to my will (not like in movies, but can simply live in moments forever, since I have a firm knowledge that time doesn’t exist as we know it.)

I looked around and was pleased to see that Everything was in it’s Right Place. Nothing was moving, but seemed to be exactly where it should be. If an object moved, it didn’t matter because it’s new place was exactly where it should be. I as also exactly where I should be, so I began to get very happy. I stood up, smiled, and hugged my singer. I began to laugh and cry at the same time as I held him, and then looked out the window. I was still having intense auditory hallucinations as cars drove by. They were flanged and seemed to echo forever. I welcomed this though. I looked over at my friends and realised that they weren’t close to as happy as me.

For the longest time, I was taking care of them, telling them it would be ok because I was ok. They come down because I came down, but they couldn’t understand language, so I left them to deal with and talked with my singer. I described the essence of my trip to him, but he didn’t understand half of what I was saying because he had never done drugs that enhanced his sense of perception. But it helped me, because I realised lots about my trip at this point.

My girlfriend came over after this upon my request. I needed someone to share my love with, and what better person then someone I truly already love. She came over, and as soon as she answered the door, I smothered her with hugs and kisses, marveling as I felt my soul connect with hers with something as simple as a touch of lips. After that day, I don’t take any kiss lightly. They are all very meaningful, because at that point, I am one with the person I am kissing. I recently found out that sex is the most amazing experience on drugs.

My girlfriend and I had smoked some killer out-door grown sativa and had copulated. While in the process, I felt our souls connect to such a point that I couldn’t decipher myself from her. We talked about this after and she had the exact feeling at that point. Now, I feel as if she is always with me.

Exp Year: 2003ExpID: 30939
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 7, 2006Views: 12,637
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Sex Discussion (14), Glowing Experiences (4)

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