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Nobody Told Me About The 'Other' Half
Mushrooms & Cannabis
Citation:   765987432. "Nobody Told Me About The 'Other' Half: An Experience with Mushrooms & Cannabis (exp84917)". Erowid.org. Jul 17, 2010. erowid.org/exp/84917

 
DOSE:
T+ 0:00
3.5 g oral Mushrooms (dried)
  T+ 1:30 0.5 bowls smoked Cannabis (plant material)
BODY WEIGHT: 182 lb
This report will cover the events of the night of February 11th when three of my friends, B, M, and D all ingested roughly 1.5 grams of dried mushrooms for the first time.

Before I start off with the actual report I'll give a little background about myself. I have always been curious about the effects of hallucinogens but never had the opportunity to try any. I had previously experimented with cannabis and inhalants and had no idea of the power contained in these 'other' drugs. I had done a little research on the effects of LSD and naively believed that it was purely a visual and auditory experience. I now know how wrong I was.

I believe that there are two aspects to a hallucinogenic trip; one half being the sensory effects and the second being the powerful state of higher consciousness or spiritual element. Before that night, nobody had bothered to tell me about this second half, if you will, of the trip. It proved to be the most mind blowing element of the entire night. The visual aspects are easier to describe textually while the spiritual aspect of the trip seems to defy any words that exist in any human language as of today. Because of this, I believe that sometimes there are great misconceptions about the ideas or feelings that individuals come to terms with while under the influence, simply because the words they use to describe them hold little relevance to the actual experience. I will attempt to dwell more on the understandable aspects of the trip for the sake of continuity and sensibility.

Originally we intended to score some acid for the night but lo and behold, our plans fell through and we were left searching for other means to pass away the night in a most memorable way. We got word of the availability of some extremely potent shrooms and quickly pitched in for roughly 4.5 grams. We waited till about eleven that night to dose, assuming that D's parents would soon be asleep. I was incredibly nervous to try them at first, but once I had finished off my portion and began to chew my favorite gum, my anxiety began to alleviate and I experienced the typical come-up excitability. We all passed the time by playing The Simpsons on D's playstation 2 and snacking on the various chips he had in his room.

I first began to notice something was different when I stood up to go to the bathroom about 30-40 minutes after eating. It seemed as though my vision was slightly pitched to the right and objects on the edge of my peripheral vision began to blur slightly. After I had washed my hands I began to stare at myself in the mirror and although there was no visible change or distortion to my appearance, I found my reflection incredibly interesting and did not leave my spot until D pulled me back into his room. This is where things began to get interesting.

As I was walking back to D's room, I found the journey between it and the bathroom to be significantly longer than it had previously been although the distance had obviously not changed. When I reached his room I began to greatly admire the various psychedelic things that D had placed about his room including chili-pepper shaped lights and artwork reminiscent of Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'. It was here where I proudly exclaimed I was having my first visual, the shadow behind the power cord to the lights had begun to twist and turn the longer I stared at it. For the next twenty minutes or so I also began to experience a strong body load that prompted me to roll around on D's bed and verbalize how amazing I was feeling at the time. The body feeling continued to the point where it became uncomfortable and I began to feel a general anxiety about the situation. It was here I found that whenever I moved from my current position, I would experience a different feeling or emotion (this would become extremely evident in the hours that followed). I saw the effects had begun to take effect on D as he was trying to drive a car UP a vertical slope in his videogame.

While B and M left D's room to go downstairs to the kitchen, I began to stare at D's iron maiden poster from across the room. It featured a skeleton clad in army attire. As I stared at it longer and longer, it appeared as if it was moving towards me at a steady pace. I found this incredibly amusing since I could change the intensity and hue of the poster simply by smiling or frowning. By this point I had long since forgotten about the body load as was pre occupied with the small visuals I was getting around D's room. D and I have been best friends for over 4 years and soon found ourselves in deep conversation over things we seem to have never covered between ourselves. At this point he seemed to be further ahead of me in his trip since not all of his sentences were making sense to me, but I was just simply distracted by the visual element of the trip that I had been expecting for so long.

Ten minutes later I began to feel a steady rise of something inside of me. It was around 12 at this time I believe, and B and M had returned from the kitchen after what seemed like an eternity. They decided to put on music to help ease our way into the trip, and we all agreed that Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon would do it for us. I had always thought that this would be one of the coolest albums to listen to while tripping and eagerly waited for it to begin. Much to my discomfort, I found the music to be abrasive and somewhat scary; it had a sort of 3 dimensional DEEP quality to it that alarmed me, eventually prompting me to ask B to turn it off. I then suddenly felt incredibly thirsty and wondered what B and M had brought from the kitchen. As B handed me a glass of water, I became immediately fascinated with it and started to take a drink. The water felt...different in my mouth, but it was not until I attempted to swallow it did I fully realize how different it would be. As I began to swallow, I could actually feel the contractions of my tongue, pushing the water down my throat. I suddenly became aware of my entire tongue and realized how easy it would be to choke on something while eating. I found this extremely frightening since every time I swallowed anything other than saliva, I experienced a tremor and a disgusting choking feeling which sent shivers down my spine. After this, I noticed that everything had taken a significantly darker tone and had a gut feeling that things were about to take a turn for the worse.

The next series of events are in ASSUMED chronological order since my sense of time was removed completely from around 1 to 3 in the morning.

B and M decided that it would be a good idea to move downstairs to the living area so we could watch TV and make more noise. After D had left the room I reluctantly followed down the stairs and passed the kitchen on the way. In the few feet between the kitchen and his living room, I began to wonder what could have possibly taken them so long to acquire a bag of chips and a few glasses of water. I then realized that I no longer needed to worry about time because it was no longer important to me. With this realization I was instantly lifted to happiness again and joyfully moved into the living room, once again taking note of my position change.

When I reached D's living room, I found him in what seemed to be a state of complete sorrow. He began crying his eyes out for no apparent reason, and my questioning as to why his emotions had changed so much were met with no apparent answer. I thought if I moved to the couch I would be more able to help him so I sat down and turned on the TV to a low volume. Suddenly B appeared and sat down on the couch adjacent to me and began talking to D and I. We attempted to stop his crying but were met with no success, he kept wondering where his tissues were and where our other friend M had gone.

At this point I seemed to reach what I thought was the peak of my trip. The world suddenly transformed into a dreamscape and although it looked nearly the same save for some color changes, everything seemed and felt so much interesting. It was as if we had been taken from D's house into some alternate universe. I began to have the strangest epiphanies and realizations about the world and universe. I now felt as if I had the answers to every question that could ever be asked. I began to vocalize these realizations to everyone who were now sitting in a circle on the couches. I felt the most powerful euphoria and spiritual essence; I had never experienced this before and was strongly taken aback by it.

In between my ramblings, B and I, who seemed to be the most collected, attempted to stop the crying of D and M. D verbally lamented on the fact that he was unable to vocalize his realizations and was incredibly upset by this. I told him it no longer mattered and that our newly gained knowledge would help us become perfect humans after our trip. This did not seem to help much and I was left struggling to form coherent sentences devoid of my drug induced ramblings.

This is where the trip became the most difficult. As we were all spewing our ideas back and forth, I personified a roller coaster to parallel our conversations. As soon as a difficult topic would arise, I began to feel the most sickening terror and nausea which seemed to emanate from every inch of my body. I would then verbalize that I no longer wanted to do shrooms since they were too painful. Regardless of this, when a pleasant topic came up in our conversation, I felt as though I was being lifted into the clouds by god himself, I am a profound atheist so this proved to be extremely eye opening for me. As our conversations continued for what seemed to be hours, I felt as though I had acquired the knowledge of ten thousand years in the course of a mere hour. I then glanced over at M, who was also crying softly and expressing how he felt as though he needed to do better in school and impress his parents more. M is a straight A honors student who always served as the best influence on our group of friends. I simply could not understand why he was breaking down while I, a B and C student who slacks off in every aspect of life, felt content with myself. I remarked on how much better of a person he was than I, and this seemed to ease his sadness a bit.

Although the roller coaster had continued, I began to feel as if I was being pulled down by horribly unpleasant thoughts and feelings. I immediately wished them upon anyone else other than me, including my best friends and parents; it was simply too much for me to bear. I lamented over the fact that I would have no problem placing this horror over B, M, or D, and I began to spiral downward even further. I started to realize how pathetic of a person I was; always lying and cheating my way out of anything I didn't have the immediate desire to do. I realized instantly how selfish I was towards the world, and I felt every aspect of my trip change. The room changed from a pleasant yellow/green to a dark red/violet (a visual I had noticed throughout the conversation but had failed to pay much attention to). I seized the attention of everyone in the room and commanded them to shut up and stare at me. With all their eyes, I felt a near full-body orgasm, some of the most intense pleasure I had ever experienced in my life. I began to notice how beautiful the eyes and teeth of a human were. They seemed to flash as if they were a reflective surface and I was left in awe as they stared at me.

This euphoria was met with a quick and unpleasant realization after I suffered what I believe to be a visual introspective. I could literally see underneath my skin, and I realized there was nothing. No love, no happiness, no emotion, just a pathetic empty shell of a wastes human space. Imaging staring into a mirror for your entire life, and being able to see both inside and outside of your body; your physical traits as well as your mental/personality traits. Then imagine the mirror is smashed before your eyes and you lose all representation and perception of who you once were. Everyone you had ever met became unimportant, and every memory you had ever experienced became meaningless. There was only blackness, a total lack of personal perception. Despite how unpleasant this was, I felt so distant that I was unable to feel sadness/depression at my realization. I soon came to the conclusion that the only reason I had survived was with the help of my friends. This proved to be my most important epiphany of the night when I concluded 'solitude is the source of madness'. I saw all humans and everything in existence as interwoven fibers of the universe. I found that when bonded together, these fibers had the power to change every aspect of the universe as we know it. My friends and I had bonded together as glowing fibers to change the emotion of the room. I saw that when a human is alone, he is subject to the predestination of the universe and is therefore controlled by it, driving him mad. I expressed this realization to everyone around me and was able to turn the trip around for everyone.

It was now around 1:30 I assumed, and the deep spiritual element of the trip had subsided for me. I was now able to focus primarily on the seemingly alien environment I was in. I so eloquently stated to my friends, 'We should ignore the rising spirituality and just...look at the floor...” I began to see beautiful patterns in D's carpet and longed to explore the rest of the house. I now noticed that I had been sitting in the same place for nearly the entire peak! I immediately longed to explore and change the 'emotions' of each room using my newfound knowledge. I stood up from my place and was overcome with an incredible wave of dizziness, I then realized how I had been sitting for the part of an hour and it would quickly go away. As soon as it was gone I walked out of his living room and into the dark foyer. It seemed as though each and every shadow was gently breathing and dancing in harmony with each other, and I felt an incredible sense of connectivity with everything around me. As I walked around and admired more of the dimly lit visuals, I found that I was forgetting more and more of what previously had happened. I instantly longed to preserve everything I had previously experienced and realized that I needed to retrieve my phone from D's room so that I could write down everything I remembered.

The danger of this adventure soon dawned on me, I had completely forgotten the possibility of getting caught by D's parents, it seemed completely alien to me at the time. I then realized that it would be extremely difficult to interact with his parents if they awoke and walked downstairs. The horror of being caught and yelled at while peaking pushed itself into my mind, and I cautiously approached the stairs leading to his room. As I was looking up the stairs, I noticed that they seemed to extend much further than I remember, so I quickly deduced that the climb would best be suited on my hands and knees. As I ventured up the stairs, I got the eerie feeling that I was getting smaller and smaller and would eventually be unable to reach the next step. As I reached the top step I completely forgot about changing sizes and found the idea hysterical but was unable to laugh without waking up D's parents.

As I walked into D's room I was taken aback by the beauty of the shadows and his posters and was momentarily stunned beyond belief while staring into the eyes of jack skellington. I searched for my phone with great difficulty but eventually found it underneath a power strip and quickly began taking notes about everything I was seeing. To my great amusement I saw my phone become concave and shrink to half size before becoming normal again. I found wonderful joy in watching this and couldn't wait to tell my other fellow trippers about it. It then occurred to me that I was in yet another universe and in great danger. I began to hear voices that seemed to be FLOATING through the door and from a dark corner behind me. I heard what I thought were footsteps and felt as though I was going insane and was going to be caught in an instant. I quickly began typing on my phone; more observations that came out like:

'Sounds come from far away, sound much closer
Hearing things that aren't there, each footstep/ambient noise is more terrifying
I'm hearing whispers
Each noise is terrifying
Do not come up here. Impossible to know what is real'

After I had finished typing and placed my phone in my pocket, I found that I was unable to move from where I was. I felt as though I was literally “trapped' inside my own mind, standing somewhere else but watching through my own eyes. I saw my surroundings become increasingly menacing and move closer and closer. My anxiety reached a near instant peak, and I felt the distance between me and my body snap. I immediately sprinted out of D's room and found myself looking down a hallway into his parents open doorway. The darkness seemed to intrigue me since I had not yet seen a place completely devoid of light since the trip began. I started forward, assuming that I would just poke my head in and be appeased but the closer I got, the more the contents of the room seemed interesting. I then noticed something strange, I had the feeling of walking forward and moving closer to the door, but it seemed as if I had not moved any further. It was almost as if the hallway, a maximum of fifteen feet in length, was moving closer to me but away from me at the same time. I saw this as a sign that I should not enter his parent’s room and turned around to go back downstairs. It was here that I was thrown into a loop. The distance from the stairway to D's room is approximately six feet, and as I looked back, I couldn't contemplate how I’d only moved roughly seven, nor could I understand how I had retrieved my phone and left the room. The whole experience seemed surreal until I was at the bottom of the staircase and moving back into the living room. It all made complete sense to me and I desperately tried to bring a friend back up to D's room with me. I was convinced I had experienced the power of a 'bad trip' and could therefore take on anything else it had to offer.

When I walked back into the living room I found B, M, and D vegetating on the couch in pure happiness. I tried to pull them away to go explore since I was graced with a new level of knowledge and euphoria, but they all instead acknowledged the dangers of being so close to D's parents and were perfectly content with staying where they were. With my newfound energy I wandered the rest of the house, observing how wooden textures seemed to flow and walls seemed to breathe and undulate with my passing. Once again everything looked basically normal but seemed so much more intriguing and interesting. It was as if I had been given a sixth sense to perceive how the world truly existed in all of its beauty. I eventually got so desperate for a fellow explorer that I dragged D out to come walk around with me. We stumbled around the rest of his house, talking about the knowledge we'd gained and how beautiful everything around us was.

I felt as though we all had our personalities pulled out from underneath us and reformed into beings of perfection. D agreed with me and we figured that we would be able to approach the world in a new light when we came out of the trip. When we walked back into the living room I thought it would be cool if we all watched Suicide Silence's 'Wake Up' video which is psychedelic on its own. When it came on I once again noticed that the music had a certain depth to it and the actual visual aspect was much more interesting. I saw things in the video that I had never noticed before and thought the whole thing was very cool.

We all eventually took our places on the couch again watching adult swim and trying to piece together how strange the cartoons were in this new mindset, which was wearing off by now. Eventually B pulled out some good ol' green and remarked that it would extend the duration of the trip and bring some of the effects back. I was initially nervous since I had no idea how the two drugs would interact with each other, but I eventually went outside and smoked about half a bowl which seemed good enough to me. I felt no initial effects but when I walked back in the house I began to feel extremely intoxicated and dizzy. I began to see what I can only describe as Technicolor dots superimposed over my entire field of vision. These were pleasant enough since they did not obscure anything.

I sat down next to the computer and thought to myself how I was barely capable of walking let alone forming complete sentences. After D went out to smoke I saw what I though was a figure of the number 1 etched on the wall in rainbow colors. This proved to only be a second-long flash but the outline of the figure was visible long after it was gone. After seeing the figure disappear I suddenly felt the right side of my body burning up. I wish that there was some way to wear clothes that only covered the left half of my body since the right half seemed to be a good ten degrees warmer. The feeling can be compared to extreme sunburn on one whole side of the body extending from the face to the foot. After D came back in and was exactly as messed up as I was, I realized that we needed to go upstairs to bed since we would be making too much noise. After I stumbled into bed, I looked at the posters on D's wall and saw them converge into a mass of darkness and then spread apart again. I smiled to myself at how amusing this final visual was and closed my eyes, falling asleep a few minutes later.

When I woke up the next morning I felt completely rejuvenated from the previous night. I started thinking about all the crazy ideas I had and began to laugh at how silly they sounded and how I thought I would be a different person in the morning. Besides feeling a slight afterglow, I was the same old me. As the day went on I noticed that my vision had improved from how it used to be before the trip, I was very pleased with this and wondered what other types of benefits the mushrooms can have on us. I was later feeling the same sort of indecisive mentality that I felt at the peak of the trip. Although it was an overwhelmingly positive and the most powerfully spiritual experience of my life, I am still not sure I possess the mental dexterity to go through it again.

If was not until many weeks later when I began thinking again about my trip did I realize the magnitude of it all. I had been friends with D, M, and B for over four years and have never seen them in the state they were in that night. I could not possibly imagine watching the night through a sober perspective. The trip made me not only respect, but also fear the power of the mind and to this day I still wonder, how much of what I saw/heard/smelled/tasted/touched/and experienced that night was real?

Exp Year: 2010ExpID: 84917
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jul 17, 2010Views: 13,289
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Mushrooms (39) : Relationships (44), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), First Times (2), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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