Not Exactly Fun, but Well Worth It
Mushrooms & Bupropion
Citation: SyeSouthern. "Not Exactly Fun, but Well Worth It: An Experience with Mushrooms & Bupropion (exp118016)". Erowid.org. Dec 20, 2024. erowid.org/exp/118016
| DOSE: |
2.5 g | oral | Mushrooms | (dried) |
| 300 mg | oral | Pharms - Bupropion | (daily) |
| BODY WEIGHT: | 95 kg |
My wife, my friend, his girlfriend, and I all went for a walk not long after ingestion. During the walk I started feeling a weird kind of nausea. It didn't feel like a normal nausea, but it wasn't pleasant. I also constantly felt like I needed to burp or something. This came in waves and later in my trip, I would have a wave of this gross feeling right before another wave of shroom experience, so it definitely seemed connected to the experience rather than plain nausea.
Anyway we eventually started walking back as I started getting a drunken sort of feeling. There was a sort of hazy filter over everything and for brief moments my legs would feel weak or like jelly. We were all basically having the same almost drunk and nauseous experience at that time based on our conversations. The walk seemed to be taking much longer than normal - I've done this walk a bunch of times before and it was taking a weirdly long time. I'd have to say this was part of the come up.
The clouds were quite beautiful that day without shrooms. It was a really nice blue sky fluffy cloud day, but they seemed extra 3D and closer in a way. A little hard to describe, but they looked interesting and not at all overwhelming or intense.
As we got closer to home, I started feeling really hot. I had a very dry mouth, and just felt super unfit. I was sweating profusely and kept thinking to myself, "I exercise way harder than this, why am I so unfit". This was a sort of recurring thought, "how am I this unfit?". I couldn't wait to get home and drink water and cool down. I started getting flashes of quite intense negative experience. Some of them were like intense memories, some of them more like intrusive thoughts. They were intense, but very brief. And at the same time I was kind of thinking to myself, "fuck that shit". Which I've kind of conditioned myself to say when my mind is giving me garbage. Compared to extreme weed paranoia which I'm very familiar with, these flashes were very manageable at this point.
As we walked in the driveway, my goddamn neighbor just HAD to stop and have a pointless small talk conversation. I generally try to avoid these conversations anyway. He's my landlord and I really hate the landlord/leaseholder dynamic so these conversations are always a little awkward for me at the best of times. But this time was of course incredibly awkward. But overall it wasn't that bad. Again, compared to weed paranoia, so I'll go into it a little bit.
I tried smiling and just saying hello and continuing to walk on but nope - he dropped what he was doing and came over. I noticed that my body language was quite anti-social; still turned towards my house and not investing in the conversation with him. So I turned towards him and listened to what he was saying. He was talking about how busy he is - there's always something to do - not enough time in the day etc. etc. I was smiling and nodding the whole time, which I generally do anyway, and I had sunglasses on because it was a sunny day and honestly, I don't think he would have known we were high at all. I made a few small talk remarks and said, "I'll let you get back to it." Still smiling. It was definitely an abrupt way to end the conversation but given the circumstances seemed like the best move. I felt basically how you might expect to feel after an interaction like this. Not great, but also sort of didn't care. In light of my history of weed paranoia, I'd have to say the shrooms didn't make me paranoid in the least bit. I think that was noteworthy.
In light of my history of weed paranoia, I'd have to say the shrooms didn't make me paranoid in the least bit. I think that was noteworthy.
We finally made it home and I was HOT and THIRSTY. Sweating like a dog. I had some water straight away and sat down. I wasn't exactly out of breath, but I really felt like I needed to sit down and blob out for a bit. I took my shirt off and was a bit cooler but still super hot. I went to get a fan and sat at the dining table with the fan on. My friend who was sort of the guide on this trip was trying to talk to me and get me do some painting or something, but I felt way too "blah". I didn't feel bad exactly, I just wanted to put my head in my arms, sitting at the dining table, and rest like that for a bit. I told him that, and he said fair enough and went to do something with his girlfriend I think.
I started feeling VERY tired, like I couldn't keep my eyes open. I went to lie on my bed and just curl up hugging a pillow which is how I usually sleep. That's when I started getting hallucinations. I found the whole thing quite profound and words can't really do justice to the experience, but I'll summarize a few key moments.
Sense experiences started blending together. For example the sense of tiredness seemed like only one surface of the "tired" experience - the one you see in normal consciousness. But I could experience other aspects of the tiredness which made it seem more like I was being sucked inward to have a inner experience. During the walk, my wife had been talking about how she had a feeling that she was being drawn out of her body, and she ended up having an amazing experience basically talking to a plant. But not me, I was being sucked inward and was registering it initially as tiredness.
I had prior experience with mindfulness meditation and I also knew to just allow whatever was going to happen to happen. So I didn't resist at all and just let go like you sometimes do at the end of a meditation session. I describe it as becoming transparent to the experience, but you can call it ego death I guess. I have been in this state intentionally during sober meditation, so it didn't feel like I was dying or cause me to freak out. I think if I had resisted, the intensity of the experience might have made this transition very jarring to say the least.
The negative experiences I had flashes of as I was walking into my driveway earlier, were now much more intense and fully formed. They would come in waves. I utilized my meditation training to become transparent to each experience and not to resist it at all. And every time I let go, my perception of the negative experience would expand and I would see that the negative aspect of the experience wasn't the whole experience. Again, it was only one surface of a much larger object of experience which you can't normally notice but which is nevertheless always there to be noticed. And that the object seen more fully wasn't at all negative. It was fractal, and colorful, and moving, and multi-dimensional, and just a lot bigger and more significant than the small part of it which was what I normally register as a single unpleasant thought, emotion, or memory.
Wave after wave of negative experience would transform into one of these very beautiful and astonishing spaces. The music I had on in the background would blend into the kaleidoscope of other experiences. I began to get the sense that I was being shown these by a conscious mind intentionally to help me learn about my own mind. That the purpose of being given these was to see how easy it is to put the negative thoughts and emotions into perspective. And there was a cheekiness to it, sort of laughing at how I take negative experience so seriously and wanting to keep showing me negative things almost as a joke
there was a cheekiness to it, sort of laughing at how I take negative experience so seriously and wanting to keep showing me negative things almost as a joke
Some of the negative experiences were of deeply repressed issues I have going way back into my childhood. I have always been very skeptical about whether a person can "repress" emotions or memories so effectively that they have no idea they're even doing it even while the issues are causing anxiety/depression symptoms. Well, I have been humbly shown that the mind can definitely do that. So in addition to being shown how silly it is to take negative emotions too seriously, I was also shown some things which are actually giving me persistent anxiety and which I can now work on because I honestly didn't know these deep issues were even a thing. Now that I know it, I see it's actually sort of obvious, and it should be a lot easier for me to begin to heal.
Around the same time the negative experiences turned into more general experiences, my wife - who by now had come into the bedroom and was lying next to me - was trying to get me to pay attention to a pot plant on the bedside table which she said was talking to her, and was apparently trying to talk to me. At first I still couldn't keep my eyes open, I was still being sucked inward. She brought it up a couple more times over the next 45 minutes (she had been staring at the pot plant the whole time) and after a while I found that I could open my eyes and pay attention to it.
She pointed out that the plant had a sort of circulatory system and that if you pay attention you can see it. I paid attention, and sure enough, I could see a flowing substance which was sort of glowing inside the plant. She pointed out that you can see the life in things. I looked and I could see that the life force of the plant was indeed somehow perceivable and distinguishable from inanimate objects. She pointed out that we could see the plant growing in real time. I couldn't see that but I did see the tendrils moving around. She said that the plant had a means of communicating which had a sound component to it, but was also blue. She couldn't understand what it was saying, but she was fully certain that it was conscious. I wish I could have heard that, but I couldn't.
By now the trip started wearing off for both of us. It had been about 3 hours since ingestion, and maybe 1.5 to 2 hours of proper tripping, with maybe 30 to 45 minutes of peak experience all of which came in waves with brief periods of relative sobriety in between. We went to the lounge area to check on my friend and his girlfriend. They were both still tripping. His girlfriend continued doing yoga for about 30 more minutes, and I later found out she had a pretty bad time dealing with body aches. He was just talking to us while still tripping. We watched a Mandelbrot set zoom animation on YouTube and popped out of the TV screen looking very 3D. It kept moving even after I paused it. Some of the visual aspects of my experiences were very much like the Mandelbrot set in terms of their fractal-ness, but also very colorful and multidimensional somehow. Eventually we were all ready to play cards against humanity, and we sat around had a great time as everything wore off properly.
Overall it wasn't what I expected. I realize now that trip reports are mostly useful for people who have had the experiences. Trip reports don't really explain the hallucinations properly unless you experience them. In saying that, there is a bodily aspect to the experience I wasn't expecting: nausea, burps, sweats, dry mouth, and feeling really unfit and gross. The nausea and the gas persisted throughout the whole trip although I only noticed it before each wave of experience. The rest went away after I started really hallucinating, apart from hot and cold flushes which were transient and not super noteworthy.
Also - I can imagine that mine could have been a frankly really bad trip if I had a different mindset or background. I don't know if I was telling myself to let go, or if that idea came from somewhere else., I'm only speculating, but I have a feeling that if I hadn't known to let go, I would have spent the whole time fighting with my ego and basically being bombarded with some of the most negative emotions and thoughts that it's possible to have. Like the worst someone has made you feel in your life, but amplified and extended into the other senses, over and over again. But as it was, I believe those negative experiences were an essential part of what was ultimately a GREAT trip. I was glad when it was over but I also really loved it. It is NOT the kind of experience I would have wanted to have if I couldn't lie down and be comfortable, and it sort of felt like medicine in the sense that it not fun per se, but revitalizing, therapeutic, and educational in the extreme. Next time I will do a higher dose, skip the walk, and go straight to lying down with my eyes closed and a chill soundtrack in the background.
| Exp Year: 2024 | ExpID: 118016 |
| Gender: Male | |
| Age at time of experience: 39 | |
| Published: Dec 20, 2024 | Views: Not Supported |
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| Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66), Pharms - Bupropion (87) : First Times (2), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17) | |
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