A friend who I originally met online contacted me and invited me to participate in a camping trip he had organized. In addition to him and myself, there were two others present, one of whom I had met twice before, and the other another online acquaintance I was meeting in the flesh for the first time. Three of us were going to be taking a fairly substantial dose of LSD (supposedly ~ 4-5 hits, maybe 200-250 mcg), and the last chose to do a smallish dose of mushrooms instead.
We arrived on the mountain and got set up in our yurt, which is a sort of tentlike structure. It had a woodstove for heat and a propane stove for cooking, so we started a fire and boiled some water for hot chocolate. We were at close to 10,000 feet and it was November first, so it was extremely cold. G (the guy I had met twice before) handed out the toothpicks that were dipped in LSD and T (the fellow who had invited me) brewed his mushrooms into a tea. Before ingesting our sacraments, we formed a circle and stated our intentions and hopes for the journey. Afterwards, G, J (the online acquaintance I had just met in the flesh) and myself began chewing up our toothpicks, and T drank his tea.
I sat and sipped hot chocolate while we waited for the LSD to take effect. Before too long (maybe twenty minutes) T and G both said they were starting to get alerts. We sat and talked as the chemicals began to work. T mentioned that the mushrooms were quite potent. He was very talkative, and his words had a strange poetry. Another friend of mine says he does his best writing on a small dose of mushrooms, and I thought of that while listening to T.
Within 40 minutes everyone was feeling the effects fairly strongly. Everyone but myself. The night before I had gone to a rave and tripped 2CB, which I worried might keep me from tripping because of cross tolerance. I was feeling something, but not what I would expect from that dose of acid. In addition I didn't feel all that well. I was having some funky body effects, not nausea precisely, but an unwell feeling in my stomach.
The trip started to pick up steam and we broke out the musical instruments (a couple of drums, a jaw harp, small percussion, a guitar, etc). T and J were drumming while G started singing. I was playing along on woodblocks and admiring G's voice, which is very powerful. We would play a bit, then stop, play a bit and stop. It was fun. G went out to take a piss and took a small walkie talkie with him. He and T chatted as he walked around outside and admired the awesome beauty of the wilderness around us. Their chatter was quite amusing to me, and I began to realize that although this acid was coming on differently than I was used to, it was shaping up to be a fairly powerful experience.
Before long G returned and we started idling around with instruments again. My discomfort had slowly been increasing and I realized I needed to use the bathroom. After visiting the outhouse I stopped on the way back to marvel at the sky. It was enormously beautiful and I suddenly felt the mushroom presence. I had an intuition that the mushrooms had engineered this event. I was very glad that T had decided to take mushrooms. I knew that this trip was going to be a tremendous one at that moment, as I stood staring into a cloudy sky. It was a new moon, and in the absence of moonlight I could see a few stars behind the clouds. It was quite lovely.
I returned inside and told everyone that it was wonderful outside and that they would have to go check it out before too long. I sat down again and took up a drum. We started drumming and playing whatever instrument was at hand. G was singing, and to my ears, our collective attempt at music sounded great.
We went on like this for a while, stopping and starting up again as the mood struck us. J started telling stories about some previous experiences, and seemed to be having trouble keeping a linear narrative going. He was all over the map, telling several stories at once and lapsing into a running commentary of the event as it unfolded. T was also talking at times, but he was speaking more lines of his strange poetry, which would turn to glossolalia ( a phenomena which fascinates me). J's constant chatter began to annoy me. It wasn't so much that I wasn't interested, just that I thought there were better times to tell such stories. Rather than say anything (I didn't want to harsh his trip) I just concentrated on the drum I held. As I played with it my fascination with it grew. I was hitting it at different points on the surface and listening to the different sounds it made. I decided then I had to get one for myself.
My visuals were interesting. They reminded me more of my 2CB visuals than acid visuals. The colors were darker, and instead of the flowing, rippling patterns I usually have on LSD they were tightly knit complex designs. They were very similar to the visuals I experienced at the previous night's rave.
About three hours into the trip I decided to smoke some cannabis. I was over the peak and I felt I could use a little more. I loaded up the bong and decided to take it outside and have a bonghit under that awesome sky. I walked down the stairs of the yurt and smiled up at the boundless eternity above me. I hit the bong, a big toke that over filled my lungs. I held it for a few seconds and exhaled into the cold air. I took a small breath and immediately began coughing. And my coughing didn't stop, it just got worse. Holding the bong I stumbled up the stairs and into the yurt, coughing violently and painfully. I managed to hand the bong to someone before collapsing onto the floor, where I continued to cough. This went on for a few minutes. Finally I was able to get a drink of water and get my coughing under control.
At this time I was in one of the most profoundly altered states of my life. My OEVs (open eye visuals) before the bong hit had been almost nonexistent. Now, there was patterning and bright colors all over everything, moving and blinking in and out of existence. I managed to stumble to one of the beds in the yurt where I lay down.
I closed my eyes and my companions began drumming, singing and chanting. With my eyes closed I had numerous visions of plants and flowers that morphed into female genitalia and back to flowers. My visuals with eyes closed were immense, rivaling some of my mushroom visuals. The drumming and chanting provided an anchor and propellant to my trance and I was able to go deep into it. I remained lying on the bed, out of body for quite some time while they played. I was only dimly aware of my actual location in space/time, my identity, or anything else but the show in my head.
After some time (I have no idea how long) I came out of it and sat up. I was still incredibly stoned. I took a seat and told everyone a bit about it. We started playing again, on and off. Whenever we would stop, J would pick up his narrative again. This began to annoy me more and more and I thought of saying something, but chose not to, again so as to avoid harshing his trip. I did drop a few hints, which he didn't pick up on (or chose to ignore).
I had brought along some salvia and T and G were both interested in trying some. I told them if they did while the rest of us drummed, they should expect one of the most intense experiences of their life. They thought about that while we played.
G and I were drumming at this point, while T and J played other instruments and occasionally chanted. G sang on and off. I noticed that if I simply let go and played I would fall into some awesome rhythms, but if I tried to think and analyze what I was doing I invariably screwed up. It was very easy to lose oneself in the beat, a fact which G remarked upon several times when we stopped for a moment or two. It induced a trance of sorts. I am very interested in trying this with mushrooms, which encourage a trance by themselves. I suspect this would be an awesome experience.
After a while G decided to try salvia. I loaded it for him and gave him instructions on how to smoke it (big hits, held as long as possible and smoked as rapidly as possible). He began smoking it and after four or five deep hits handed me the bong and layed back. We began drumming again. After a minute or two he sat up with a strange look on his face. He asked me "How long does this drug last?" I merely shrugged, since I wasn't sure how long it might last while already tripping. He nodded and lie back down as we began to drum again. Before too long (maybe three or four more minutes) he sat up again and started talking about the salvia. The essence of his words were " I had no idea a drug could do something like that". Let me mention here G is a seasoned tripper (we all were). He routinely takes very large doses of LSD, and he is experienced with most of the other common psychedelics (MDMA, mushrooms) as well. He described it as reality being bisected by a plane. He said he felt he was separated from us by this "reality plane". He said he wasn't sure he ever wanted to do it again, then smiled and said he'd have to for that very reason.
No one else wanted any salvia, so we returned to drumming again. We alternated our music with that provided by a small battery powered cd player for the rest of the night. I smoked more cannabis on and off throughout the rest of the experience when I felt it warranted. Before too long the sun came up and we began cleaning up the yurt in preparation for going home.
This experience was incredible for a number of reasons. It was unlike any of my approximately forty other LSD trips. It was very shamanic. I felt as if something happened up there that I won't feel the full results of for some time. This experience came at the end of a fairly intense period of tripping, as I had tripped every weekend for previous 5 weeks, as well as the night before (which was my sixth week). It felt like the end of a shamanic journey of some sort. I expect that many of the insights I picked up on this trip will be with me for quite some time, and the full results may not be felt for years. All in all, it was a very positive trip. I plan on doing a similar one soon, this time with 5 gr of mushrooms instead of LSD.