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Alien Shrooms Indeed
4-HO-MiPT & Alcohol
by SoaV
Citation:   SoaV. "Alien Shrooms Indeed: An Experience with 4-HO-MiPT & Alcohol (exp67088)". Erowid.org. Dec 6, 2007. erowid.org/exp/67088

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
0.5 glasses oral Alcohol - Beer/Wine (liquid)
  T+ 0:15 16 mg oral 4-HO-MiPT (powder / crystals)
  T+ 4:45   repeated oral Alcohol - Beer/Wine (liquid)
BODY WEIGHT: 57 kg
Date of experience: 10 November 2007

Dosage:
T-0:15 > ½ can of Heineken
T+0:00 > 16mg (approx) of 4-HO-MiPT
T+4:30 onwards > several beers and alcopops

The list of psychoactives under my belt still growing slowly at the grand medium age of 23, I had my first experience with 4-HO-MiPT, or “miprocin” as I shall hereafter refer to it for the sake of leisurely typing, five evenings ago. Before this journey into the previously unexplored world of research chemicals I’d had extensive experience with cannabis (used to smoke it like I now smoke tobacco; have now all but stopped), alcohol (at least weekly), amphetamine (a brief spell of speed addiction has ensured closer-than-is-comfortable familiarity), ecstasy (one of my favourites) and magic mushrooms (one great trip a couple of months ago, and before then on many an occasion during my teens). I furthermore have some experience with MDMA crystals (once oral and once snorted), H.B. woodrose (great trips, hideous taste), salvia (fascinating terror every time) and herbal ecstasy (Trip-E’s: surprisingly potent considering their reputation but nothing compared to most other psychoactives I've known and loved).

My fairly new but very close friend AB, whom I was visiting in Ireland at the time, had obtained some miprocin from a website selling research chemicals just over a year ago. He had tried it six or seven times before and could therefore confidently assure me that the effects would be quite similar to mushrooms and that the evening would not end with me curled up in the fetal position at the foot of a toilet. I am normally quite at ease with regard to potential side effects of psychedelics as I have so far found them to be essentially harmless physically, but the fact that AB and I did not have a safe haven to escape to should things go wrong caused me to be that little bit more cautious than usual. You see, I was staying at a B&B over the weekend and AB lives with his parents - who would most likely be less than happy to find two giant-pupiled, giggling adults dwelling in their home – so once the effects set in properly we would not have anywhere tranquil to relax. But I digress.

Eager tripper that I am, I was terribly excited about trying this unusual substance for the first time. We planned to take an approximate 20mg somewhere on Saturday afternoon but once the time rolled around we resettled on slightly less, approximately 15mg each, as we were both a little apprehensive as well as shaky and hungover from two nights of steady drinking. Having extracted the bag with a small capsule three-quarters full of powder from the freezer where he stores it, AB carefully measured out what his little scale assured him was 16mg each wrapped in green Rizla papers. At 5pm in the afternoon I was handed one of the little parcels, which I swallowed down quickly with some Sprite. I did not notice any taste as the paper split slightly in my mouth.

AB had told me that the effects would set in after about 20 minutes, however it took closer to 30-40 minutes before I noticed any effects at all, possibly because we had eaten a slightly ill-advised biggish meal of bacon and sausages very soon before ingestion. Regardless of the reason I was somewhat surprised at the extremely gradual come-up of the drug; last time I took mushrooms (liberty caps, to be precise), it being the most comparable substance I have previously taken, the effects hit me full force after 20 minutes and remained evenly intense until the comedown hours later. With miprocin the effects sneaked up on me very, very quietly. I commented on this to AB, who told me it was one of the things he liked about the drug.

For two brief-seeming hours we simply lay in bed, idly watched TV and spoke in hushed tones about the slowly increasing effects. About an hour in the walls started to breathe in my peripheral view, and not long thereafter I began to feel a bit confused and verbally challenged in almost but not quite the same inexplicable way as I might during a mushroom come-up. It was also at this time that my mental state began to shift from “everyday” to “unusual”. The change is very hard to explain, in particular as I didn’t realise until well into the trip when it had first happened, but it could be described loosely as a dream-like state where my mind seemed to have access to and faint memories of another dimension or reality that at the time felt completely real. The clearest image I had was one of my face – looking a little different from usual with sickly pale skin and an oddly protruding nose and chin – somehow suspended in semi-darkness, apparently pondering something. AB encouraged me to place my palms over my eyes to see if I had any closed-eye visuals; a faint image of a kitchen seen through a vine-covered border appeared, followed by a backlit, stained-glass church window, but except for that my internal vision was sparse.

At seven o’clock, precisely two hours after ingestion, I had a sudden premonition that it would probably be best to head out and past AB’s parents before the effects would come on proper. AB felt the same way and after I had rolled a swift and wobbly cigarette, down the stairs we went. AB’s mother cornered us, trying to tempt us both with some casserole (which smelled delicious), and as I noticed patterns on the floor starting to undulate and criss-cross noticeably the familiar Fear grabbed me and had me mumbling a swift “No thanks” and rushing out the door without looking back. Once outside I all but jogged away from the house with AB closely following, telling me to slow down. I was labouring under the irrational sense that the house itself was watching, even pursuing me; I am not a fan of engaging with sober people whilst tripping, parents in particular being a definitive pet peeve.

Leaving the house at that point turned out to be a perceptive idea: my high increased exponentially as soon as I stepped outside, and had I been forced to interact with anyone sober a mere 10 minutes after leaving I would probably have fainted with terror. Aimlessly we set off in the autumn darkness on a walk around the neighbourhood in the smallish suburb that AB calls home. We haven’t known each other for long but nevertheless appear to be very evenly matched tripping partners - conversation flowed easily except for the occasional pockets of silence caused (at least from my end) by salvia-like verbal blocks. At one point early on in our walk we came across one of AB’s friends, relating to us some strange story about piercing his scrotum, none of which I was able to absorb (my understanding of Irish accents is limited at the best of times and unsurprisingly psychedelic visual distractions do nothing to improve my handicap).

The high kept ebbing and flowing in intensity, the sense of inexplicable weirdness was overwhelming, and AB’s (borrowed) description of miprocin as “weird alien shrooms” seemed to fit perfectly. I have never tripped outside on mushrooms before so I do not know if the visuals are more comparable than I experienced, but I found these to be more realistic and somehow more distracting than mushroom visuals. The introspective aspects, on the other hand, were less tangible: on mushrooms I tend to experience veritable hammer blows of empathy and understanding for all living things; on miprocin I was too busy staring open-mouthed at plates in the road sliding back and forth and the sky bending and flowing before my eyes, taking the stars with it.

Lacking a physical aim we decided after walking around for a while to lie down on a field to look at the sky. The clouds were awe-inspiring: I saw rows of enormous creatures in them, seemingly dancing rhythmlessly hand in hand in an absolutely straight line a couple of metres from my face. The creatures were not threatening despite their slightly demonic appearance and nor did I relate to them in my head as real, live beings. The size of the sky made the sight all the more overpowering, and I allowed myself to ponder briefly how small we are in our little universe. However, similarly to the way the room I inhabit on a mushroom trip turns into the whole world, the planet I was sitting on seemed reasonably sized and in proportion. Looking over toward the horizon I thought I saw lightning where lights seemed to flash brightly in the corner of my eye. This is where the visuals began to turn very insistent, if not entirely overwhelming. It was freezing on the field and we decided to move on just as some frightening children appeared out of the shadows with a football. In the dark I could not differentiate between holes in the ground and solid grass and was relieved to return to the lit pavement.

We walked a very short distance, noticing the time on my mobile phone (19:50; nearly three hours in), then sat down at a small bench overlooking the field we had just been lying in. Our conversation was giggly and a little stuttery: as AB had indicated would happen, I kept thinking I was leveling out to suddenly be overwhelmed by a new surge of visual intensity, often combined with that indefinable sense of being split between two realities. Fittingly we conducted a discussion about perspectives and the fact that one person’s (or organism’s, or even substance’s for all we know) perspective is likely to be quite different from another’s, and that psychedelics could potentially be a way to explore such a shift in perspective. This is a notion that has always interested me greatly, regardless of whether it is rational or indeed true.

Furthermore our conversation often turned to the occasionally spotted “normal people” (or “humans”, as I tend to refer to sober people when tripping without considering the irony), who we felt were giving us odd looks all the time – this was probably not the case at all, although we may have looked a little suspicious in the way that we were unabashedly gawping after dogs and passing vehicles as if we’d never seen anything quite like them before. AB was lamenting the fact that his trip was neither as visual nor as euphoric as his last one had been, and I felt bad for him but was inconsiderately too distracted by the constant visuals to display much sympathy. At this point the most distinct ones involved the road directly in front of me and the sky by the horizon: the concrete slabs by my feet were moving back and forth in a highly realistic fashion, and the clouds appeared to be flashing and vibrating constantly.

At 20:06 I once again checked the time on my mobile, and both AB and I giggled at how we couldn’t determine whether that seemed very early, very late or neither. One quality I have come to take notice of about this brand of loss of time perception is that whilst neither “too long” nor “too short” appears to fit, the logical intermediate of “perfectly reasonable” always appears equally nonsensical. In any case: AB, shivering with the cold, asked that we continue on our walk, and I obliged after rolling a cigarette. I could feel that my skin was cold, even under my jacket, but somehow the chill never quite reached my brain. This was a welcome surprise as I’d anticipated based on cannabis-fueled forays into the wintery outside that the cold would have me pleading for mercy. Admittedly, however, I would have enjoyed a warm, cosy indoor location for us to enjoy, certainly for AB’s sake if not for my own.

After a very brief walk around a block we ended up at the same bench that we had just left, except with me sitting precisely where AB had been sitting and vice versa. I commented on the amusing side of this, considering we had just discussed personal perspectives and “seeing things from another’s point of view”. Once again I was plunged into a zealously executed visual phase, again featuring the same road and skyline view as previously. I kept staring at blinking airplane-like shapes in the distance, unable to determine whether they were moving across the sky or not. Trying to explain to AB the internal sensation of dual dimensions, I put forth that miprocin appears to be literally like a mushroom of another planet, as suggested by the “weird alien shrooms” analogy. We both agreed that, in compliance with this theory, mushrooms have a somehow earthy, grounded feel to them. My final stab at properly explaining the sense of duality was when I told AB that it felt like I could almost but not quite access that other place, and if only I could crack some... code, or similar, some cryptic solution to an unknown mystery would immediately become clear. It is very much how I felt at the time but the description does not do the feeling justice.

After yet another few minutes of sitting we decided to get up and walk again. After another few minutes of ambling around the neighbourhood it was 21:00, meaning that four hours had passed since the ingestion of the drug, and we finally decided that we were both feeling stable enough to act relatively sober (at this point I had come to believe that the split-reality sensation was an actual part of my sober personality). However, as I often do when tripping, I kept thinking that my high state was clearly visible just by looking at me, and I was extremely nervous as I walked into AB’s house. His mother was upstairs, his brother was in the kitchen and his dad was in the living room down the hall. I needed to go to the bathroom and to that end subtly slipped through the loo door. Once there, however, I was unable to find the light, which was actually located next to the door on the outside, and because of this I couldn’t see if the door was closed and locked. Trembling with nerves I decided that I’d rather skip going to the bathroom than jiggle the door handle to test if it was secured. Quietly I sneaked out again, praying that the brother and father hadn’t spotted my suspicious behaviour.

Once safely ensconced in AB’s room, sipping a Heineken I’d started on earlier, my visuals and overall feelings of strangeness began to abate considerably, and by the time we went to fetch ourselves some more cans at around T=5:00 I was all but back to baseline. This stands in some contrast to mushrooms, whose afterglow effects tend to be noticeable for me until after I have slept. I did not feel entirely regular until the day after on this occasion either but the comedown certainly had a distinct sliced-off quality to it. AB told me that he usually tops up after an hour or two precisely because the high is quite short-lasting, and I would be inclined to agree that this sounds like a good idea.

On AB’s recommendation we spent the last stages of the comedown, from T+4:30 onwards, drinking first a couple of cans at his house and then another couple at his local. I was now feeling perfectly regular again and had no real problems associating with non-tripping people. After leaving the pub with one of AB’s best friends we went over to his house where I made the mistake of drinking one Heineken rather quickly, then all but downing another. When we arrived back at my B&B I was gripped first by a searing headache and then quite overwhelming nausea. I cannot say whether the former was caused by the 4-HO-MiPT, or perhaps a combination of that and alcohol, but I am pretty certain that the nausea was merely due to my adolescently irresponsible drinking. After being sick in the bathroom I finally drifted off to sleep somewhere well into the wee hours; AB struggled to fall asleep as he often does and slept uneasily once he did, although I would not say that this was due to the drug’s after-effects. The day after I felt entirely back to normal, save for mild non-invasive flashbacks that to a lesser extent still remain.

All in all the trip was a great experience and I’m looking forward to the already-planned repeat of it. Next time it will take place with the same very excellent tripping partner, AB, but in my own flat, free of parents and other intruding forces. A slightly higher dose – say 20-25mg as opposed to 16 – to increase possible euphoric effects and visuals would be interesting, and as I have the feeling that the drug is in essence more suited to introspection than interaction it will be lovely to investigate how music and perhaps films or computer visualisations combine with miprocin. AB and I have also considered combining it with methylone or – if suppliers allow – ecstasy, which should make for an interesting, extra-dimensional experience.

Exp Year: 2007ExpID: 67088
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Dec 6, 2007Views: 32,997
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4-HO-MiPT (342) : General (1), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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