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Dancing on the Edge of Insanity and Death
Mushrooms & Cannabis
by Qb
Citation:   Qb. "Dancing on the Edge of Insanity and Death: An Experience with Mushrooms & Cannabis (exp96300)". Erowid.org. Feb 6, 2016. erowid.org/exp/96300

 
DOSE:
10 g oral Mushrooms
  1 bowl smoked Cannabis
BODY WEIGHT: 60 kg
That's my first trip report. I felt the need to finally write about my experience as a warning to anybody that's planning on taking mushrooms.

Some background: This trip took place in 2006, I was 21 years old, around 60kg, cigarette smoker. I was very experienced with smoking cannabis (in huge quantities, every day, for a couple of years), I was also very experienced with alcohol drinking (I could drink a bottle of vodka by myself and still manage to be somewhat coherent). I had some experience with Ecstasy (I had taken E about 20-30 times), little experience with amphetamines (4-5 times), had smoked Salvia three times (5X - a really weird and intense experience, then 20X twice - did almost nothing for me), had eaten a small San Pedro cactus (about 10cm - nothing). I had also taken mexican mushrooms (one mushroom the size of a thumb) and had a mild but very euphoric and positive experience with it.

At the time, I was VERY interested in psychedelics and in drugs in general, so I had read quite a few reports and info. However when we received the mushrooms, we were very eager to take them, so that made us extremely ignorant and made us take a huge risk because of our stupidity. I know it's kind of cliché to list the mistakes, but I feel it could help someone in the future so bear with me.

Set: Positive, although I had some stuff in the back of my head, mostly related to school and family.

Setting: My appartment at the time, in the center area of the city (mistake 1), somewhat trippy decoration. There were 4 of us - Me, my GF at the time (B), and two friends (L and M). B had the same experience as me with the mexican mushrooms, L and M were both first timers. No sitter (mistake 2 - MAJOR MISTAKE, read on).

It was the beginning of summer, in southern France. I had been reading a lot about psychedelics and had gathered quite a bit of knowledge regarding the classic psychedelics. I had determined that mushrooms were probably the best way to get into the world of psychedelics. They seemed the easiest to find, the easiest to ingest, and generally seemed like the most interesting/mystical of the three to me (compared to LSD and Mescaline cacti). So I talked to B, L and M, and they were all willing to try them with me. I tried to find some info on which of the different types were the strongest and most visual and ended up ordering 40g of the Thai variety. I had read somewhere that for a good strong trip one should eat between 5g and 10g.

I recieved them on Thursday, so we decided we would take them on Friday. Well, sure enough Friday came and we gathered at my place around 9am. We briefly entertained the idea to go in a park outside, but decided that we wouldn't want to be in public if we freaked out. So we decided to stay in my apartment.

T+ 0:00: We talked a bit and then proceeded to eat 10g each (mistake 3 - HUGE MISTAKE), on an empty stomach. For me the taste wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, so I munched them very quickly. The others took a bit longer but eventually ate their doses in about 10 mins. We continued talking, we were in a good mood, and expected a brilliant experience. We felt safe in my place, and we were sure we made the right choice to stay indoors.

T+ 0:10: I think I can already feel a mild rush of energy and a need to talk. Everyone seems to feel that way, somewhat similar to an E come up.

T+ 0:20: Wow, this is waaay faster than I thought, I begin to feel weird, as the previous energizing buzz subsided and got replaced by something I have never experienced. It's somewhat like a strong marijuana rush but very weird in some way, and kind of alarming. Anyway, I tried to not pay much attention to it, because I had read that sometimes the come up can be a bit intense and frightening, so I knew that was normal. What kept me a alarmed though was that it happened so fast. I was expecting to wait for at least 30-45 mins before feeling anything, but here I was, 20 mins after ingestion already feeling the effects getting stronger and stronger.

T+ 0:30: We try to continue our conversation but that becomes difficult. I feel confused and out of words. L is sitting on the couch and states he's very far away now. At first we giggle at him, but only a minute after that the effects double. I am definitely very confused now. I can no longer talk right, and don't feel the need to anyway. I look at the carpet - it's an orange carpet with white and dark brown circles on it. I am sure I can see the circles dancing around each other. I think that's stupid, and rub my eyes and look again. The fucking circles are definitely spinning in groups in a very intricate way. That scares me a bit. I try to get up to take a glass of water but that's not so easy, I'm nauseated. However I manage to go to the kitchen and drink some. I return to the room and try to start a new conversation. Me, B and M kind of manage to talk some, but L is definitely tripping. After a minute he says the lady on the poster across the room is staring at him in a bad way, so he gets up and starts punching the poster, after that he sticks a small photograph on her face so she could no longer freak him out with her eyes. We find that amusing and start laughing in a crazy way. L is however becoming negative and starts insulting and speaking bad stuff to M.

T+ 0:45: M decides to stop listening to L's bullshit and sits in front of the computer to play a bit of NFS. In the meantime, my nausea got worse so I go and lay on my bed (it's in the same room). The trip is becoming very intense now, more so by the minute. I see the walls and roof breathing and an obvious shift in colors - everything is more yellow and green. That freaks me out a bit, but I try to get used to my new visual perception, after all, that was the main reason I wanted to try mushrooms.

T+ 0:55: We are tripping very hard now. M left the computer, claiming in a genuinely serious and scared tone, that there was a ghost in his car in NFS. I try to calm him a bit, but I feel I can't even calm myself down. I felt the trip was still getting stronger and more than discomfortable. L is laying on the ground on his back, looking at the ceiling and laughing his ass off. B isn't in the room, so I call her name. She arrives, holding weird stuff in her hands, that made no sense at all. She proceeds to put it in the middle of the room, and goes away. In a couple of minutes, she comes back with more weird stuff, and piles it up in the middle with the other things. I now realize she's piling up only yellow things! She continues doing that till there is quite a few objects, like a pile 50cm high and all of them yellow! She giggles and says 'Yellow is so friendly, don't you think?! Yellow is fucking friendly!'

I no longer have any sense of time so I can't be accurate. At this point I'm tripping my balls off, I'm on my bed, feeling very weird and scared, because I was hallucinating like fuck. I saw strange plants growing in the corners of the room, making their way to the ceiling. The ceiling had became very rough, like in a cave, and there was weird luminous green stuff dripping from it. I remember thinking, 'Oh shit, that's what a psychedelic experience feels like, that's what mushrooms do to you, that's what people call hallucinating! It's fucking scary!!!' I was freaking out, feeling we were trying to play with something very very strong, something that one should RESPECT and not fuck around with. I felt poisoned.

In the same time I had some feelings of revelation, that this was 'the real reality', and that all my life had been a dream. I was so sure of that, that I began questioning everything. Were my mom and dad real ? Was my brother real ? I began screaming my brother's name, asking the others if he was real, if anything was real. No one was capable of talking, so I felt very lonely and scared. I tried speaking to B, I looked at her face and it was fucking ALIVE! I mean, it was a whole planet in itself. Little things/specs were coming out of her nose, orbiting her face and going into her ears. She was smiling so that calmed me down a bit. L continued laughing and cursing at the ceiling. B asked him who he was talking to, he said he wasn't laughing at us, but to the 'people of the ceiling'. During this time, M was out of it, really, he was almost unable to say a word and made very strange noises, like an animal of some sort.

I thought we should smoke a joint to calm ourselves a bit (Mistake 4). M took some rolling papers, some weed and a fork for some reason, but apparently he didn't know what to do with it. I took my waterpipe, put the weed in it and took a hit. B and M followed. In the meantime L got up and started insulting everyone of us. Needless to say that put a bad vibe into the whole experience. This is where things got really out of control. I was hallucinating so bad, I could no longer see anything. I couldn't discern what was real and what wasn't. Everywhere, everything was going insane, fractals overlayed the shit out of the room, it was horrible. I tried closing my eyes, but that made it even worse, so I tried to keep them open.

Around this moment we all forgot we had taken mushrooms! We were freaking out, I couldn't see the others, I was on my bed, trying to escape but I couldn't. This went on for an hour maybe, when all of a sudden (and that's something I can't explain), we all snapped back into reality, at the same precise second, and remembered we were tripping on shrooms. We all tried to calm ourselves, that it was the shrooms, and that it would be over in a couple of hours. Right when we were saying that, we forgot what we were talking about, and we forgot about the shrooms again! It was terrifying! I didn't remember much after that, other than a couple more times, maybe every hour or so when we would remember that we were tripping, but we would forget again, and this went on and on. We didn't know what was going on.

At some point M fell on the ground face first, breaking B's pile of yellow stuff, breaking his nose and swallowing his tongue. I was freaked out beyond belief, I have never ever in my life been so terrified. I didn't know what to do! Thanks God, L managed to pull himself together and got M's tongue out, having his finger bitten very bad in the process. M got up, but he was bleeding bad. The room was a mess. M called a friend of us - Na. Na came to my appartment and we all went to the neighboor to ask for her to help with the bleeding. She knew we were tripping but she helped. This accident kind of helped the others snap a bit out of it, but I was still tripping balls. We went out and got into L's car, to go to the hospital. I was sure I was dreaming, so I wasn't talking to anybody. In the car they were asking if I was ok, but for some reason I wouldn't answer.

We finally got to the hospital, it was full of people waiting. I felt I had to piss really bad, so I began unzipping my pants, but the others stopped me. They fixed M's nose and L's finger and we went to L's place. There I slept for two or three hours, and finally got back when I woke up. Me and B immediately retourned to my appartment where we went to sleep. We felt very anxious and very bad for what we did, because M could've died very easily if it wasn't for L somehow managing to get his tongue out.

I haven't since taken any psychedelics, I just stick to smoking weed. I don't know if I'm ever going to take any psychedelics again, because of that trip. However, I wouldn't take that experience out of my life, I feel it taught me some about the relativity of everything and the fragility of human life. I also feel it made me more spiritual and open minded, and taught me I should respect drugs, even weed. I feel we made a lot of mistakes (having no sitter, being in a closed space, with lots of things that can freak one out, taking too much shrooms, smoking weed 'to calm down', etc.)

I wouldn't advise against taking mushrooms, but I urge you to be extremely careful with dosage, set and setting, to be well prepared and, for God sake, to have a sober person around! Please..

Exp Year: 2006ExpID: 96300
Gender: Male 
Age at time of experience: 21
Published: Feb 6, 2016Views: 2,927
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Mushrooms (39) : Difficult Experiences (5), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Bad Trips (6), Small Group (2-9) (17)

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