After a five week absence I returned to visit the mushroom again. I prepared with my usual 24 hour fast. On this trip I was planning to smoke some salvia while peaking, so I took less than my usual 5 gm dose. I estimate I took 3 gm, give or take a little. I also asked one of my closest friends to come and sit for me, since both mushrooms and salvia are so disorienting. I was afraid I might try to walk off or something. She took a small 1 gm dose to be in tune with me.

I powdered the mushrooms and added them to a small glass of orange juice. Eight minutes after ingestion I began to feel the first effects, a slight pressure on my head and a change in the quality of the light. A few minutes later I started to feel slightly nauseous. I turned off the music and lights and lay down on the couch in my living room.

The mushroom effects and nausea developed side by side. As visuals started appearing in the blackness my stomach was roiling and threatening to revolt. I had my sitter get a bucket out of my room for me, so I wouldn’t have to move if I needed to vomit.

Usually I trip mushrooms alone, and I was very aware of the presence of another person in the room with me. My breathing was ragged at times, giving way to panting occasionally as the nausea came and went. When I wasn't breathing too loudly I could occasionally hear her breathing a few feet away, from her spot on the floor. I was slightly uncomfortable where I was lying and thought about moving, but it was difficult for me to make any decisions or find the motivation to actually do so.

I got up and went into the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet I began thinking about various aspects of my life. I realized that I was letting some things get out of hand and that I needed to resolve them as soon as possible. I also realized that I expect far more from myself than anyone else does, and that I drive myself, often too hard. I was aware of changes being made on an almost unconscious level.

I spent quite a while in the bathroom (over an hour). I was not feeling at all well, and I considered whether maybe I had poisoned myself. I tried to dismiss this idea, since the mushrooms were from a trusted source (although a different source than usual), but I seemed unable to shake it. I felt so shitty physically it was hard to think about anything else.

At that time, I decided I wasn't going to smoke salvia that night. The trip was considerably more intense than I had planned on, not to mention very turbulent. It just didn't seem like a very good idea at the time. Once I made the decision to not smoke the salvia, I felt a degree of relief. I think that the mixture of the two will be quite powerful when I do get around to trying it, but that just wasn't the time.

When I finally managed to find the motivation to leave the bathroom I was starting into the peak of the trip. I walked out of the bathroom and into my kitchen to get a drink of water. Having accomplished this I started back into the living room. I didn't make it too far through the living room when a huge wave of mushroom energy overtook me, pulling me to the floor.

I lay on the floor gasping and trying to catch my breath. The intensity of the experience was almost frightening, largely because I simply wasn't expecting to go this far on 3 gm. My sitter returned from the bathroom to find me lying on the floor. She asked if I was ready to smoke the salvia, and I told her I wouldn't be smoking any salvia that night. She asked if I was all right and I told her I didn't know. We discussed this for a minute or so. She asked if I wanted her to start my tape recorder, and I responded that it sounded like a good idea.

As I was lying there on the floor I was being overcome by wave after wave of mushroom energy. It was very strong, and each wave caused me to tense up my body (and mind?). It wasn't precisely painful, but it was extremely uncomfortable. I was still pretty nauseous during this as well. I was making quite a bit of noise, and my sitter mentioned it sounded like I was in labor. I told her that was how I felt, and asked her what labor was like (she has two children). She described it and it sounded remarkably similar to what I was feeling.

We fell silent as I lie there zoning off and slipping into trance. My discomfort started to ease, and I started receiving visions. On the tape that I made you can hear the transition. I stopped being uncomfortable (for the most part) and started being awed. I kept saying "Oh wow!" and "I don't believe this!". The substance of my visions included various themes from previous mushroom trips, including visions of humanity working towards some great goal, and our eventual "reward" which included leaving the planet, gaining access to all the accumulated knowledge of the universe, etc. Very far out, science fiction kind of stuff. I tried to get some of what was going through my head onto tape, but all I managed was "We are monkeys, camping in the future". The visions were coming in too rapid succession for me to translate them into words.

This was two hours into my trip, as I was starting to peak. The trip had smoothed out considerably and I was deeply in trance. My mind started making all sorts of connections, leading me from one set of visions to another. Many of these visions were related to, or directly taken from "The Wizard of the Upper Amazon" by F. Bruce Lamb, a book I had just finished reading. In particular, there was one scene with a jaguar that attacks and kills and is killed by an anteater. I started off in the jaguar, and sprung at the anteater, grabbing its throat in my teeth as it wrapped its claws around me and dug them in. Just as it started to rip into me and I into it, I switched to the anteater's perspective, and felt my throat being torn by the jaguar I was holding and clawing into. Other, similar chains of being include being inside a honeycomb, presumably as a bee, when a giant claw pierced the wall of the comb and began to pull it open. Just as sunlight broke through into the comb, I was in the body of the bear who was pulling the comb apart to eat the honey. A more mundane vision included being a man working on some playground equipment and then being a child playing on the same equipment. I experienced many connections like this, and I believe the entire peak of the trip was more a less an unbroken chain of these connections. Many, many of the scenes were taken from the book I mentioned. I sensed connections between everything, usually unseen. It was awesome.

My visions varied in the degree of involvement. During some of them it was like watching a television scene. Others I was present in the scene, but as an observer. And in some, I was a participant in the action. In all cases the visions had a high degree of realism.

My sitter asked if I minded if she went home. I was stabilized by then and I told her to go ahead, and thanked her for helping me through the experience. After she left I lay on the floor following chains of visions, making strange connections between things. Most of this I don't really remember.

My ego started to reformulate approximately three hours after I took the mushrooms. As I came back to myself I was quite amazed at the experience I had been through. Once I realized where and when I was, my visions stopped. I was still tripping however, and in the dark apartment I saw complex patterns of scrollwork everywhere. My visuals were seemingly asymmetric, or maybe fractally symmetric. There was a pattern there, but it was huge. This scrollwork was ever moving, morphing between shapes by the second. It was beautiful, and I alternated between watching it and reminiscing about the visions I had experienced. I spent the next hour or hour and a half sitting on the living room floor in that state.

Around 11:30 I got up, picked up the debris of my trip, and headed over to the house of some friends of mine (my sitter was one of these friends). We discussed the trip and hung out for a couple of hours. I went home and tried to sleep, but my mind was too excited for a long time. I was finally able to sleep around four am. I awoke at eleven the next morning, totally refreshed and in an excellent mood.

This experience was very powerful. I was not expecting to get a trip of 5 gm intensity off of 3 gm. I have read about this before in a Gracie and Zarkov report. I believe they refer to it as the "rabbit hole" effect. For some people, it seems once they have "been there" on a high dose trip, they can slip right back into it on any dose. I am interested in exploring this further. I did notice a few differences between this and my normal trips, but it is hard to be sure whether to attribute these to the presence of another person, the dose, my mind set, or something else entirely.

The trip felt suffused by salvia energy, even though I didn't smoke any. The intensity of the trip was overwhelming, largely because I was not expecting it. It can be very disconcerting when you are expecting to trip X hard and you end up with 2X. In any case, it was a very illuminating trip, and the sequence of visions I experienced was extraordinarily cool. Again, mushrooms have amazed me.