my first mushroom trip
It was my first mushroom trip; Ben's second. I returned from lectures and we divided the packet up on a plate in the kitchen. Three grams each. Tall grey entities, made up more of the stalks than the shrooms themselves. They looked dry and empty, an appearance in opposition to the magic promised within. We both ate them in Ben's room. They were dry and chewy, like chewing up straw into a broth in your mouth, but not nearly as bad as I was told they'd taste. We ate the stalks too, to make sure we ate any trace chemicals left over in them.
Our bodies began to make the transition. Ben said he felt nauseous, then sick, then sat drinking water and eyeing up objects on his desk. I wasn't feeling anything yet. We sat watching a video about DMT on Ben's laptop and then I said I was gonna chill in my room while the shrooms took effect.
It all hit me quickly after that.
I started to feel nauseous then sick too. Only I hadn't stayed with Ben long enough to see what the next stage would be. My heart was racing faster and faster - I began to consider it might bloodily launch from my chest. I was pacing back and forth. A drowsiness was sinking into my body. A drowsiness devoid of tiredness or a desire for sleep, only a gravitational pull towards my bed and into a lying position. Nestled into the duvet I started to calm; the effects started to settle onto my brain.
My room's wallpaper is a flower pattern repeated on a white background. The sort of wallpaper you'd find at a grandparent's house but incidentally perfect for tripping. The patterns took on a life of their own, like little slugs, each pulsating into existence through the wall then back out of it again. Everything had an added sparkle to it.
My thoughts began to get intense. Previous psychedelics have pushed my brain to overdrive - lost in my thoughts, forgetting the environment I was in, I'd snap back to reality like waking from a dream. Yet on acid I imagine a Neanderthal banging each thought into my brain with a large rock. On shrooms I pictured a feather in the breeze dancing each thought out of my mind. A lot less intense than acid. I nestled into my bed and lost myself in the cosmos between the sheets. The act of thinking felt like a pleasurable touch on the body. I alternated between enjoying these thoughts and gawking at the visuals. I could have stayed comatose in that spot tripping all day.
I have no idea how long I lay there for. I felt like a different man from the one worriedly pacing around the room. I heard Ben trying to wake Lucas and went outside to see how he was doing. When I saw Ben I broke into laughter - the placement of his eyes and mouth were mixed up on his head. The sight of him wasn't concrete, instead it was as if on his face there was a blindspot on my vision that couldn't be moved and every sight around it had been jumbled up. I tried explaining to him about the visuals, and about the generally merry time I'd been having; he was clearly high but not riding the same wave I was on.
The house felt new to me. My home of seven months. Felt like someone who knew the look of the house but had never inhabited it before. There was a giddy feeling running right through me.
I put on my coat and shoes and we left to head toward the woods. Outside the clouds looked blocky, as if from an 8 bit video game. Me and Ben tried to describe our respective trips to each other to little avail. The visuals of any trip are the easiest part to describe, while the insides of the tripped out mind are a lot harder to communicate. If not impossible. He said he'd recently tripped on acid and this might have upped his tolerance for psychedelics, maybe why he wasn't feeling it as much.
The woods we headed to are past the university. Where we used to smoke weed while we lived on campus. It was a long walk and almost every conversation we had linked to nature in some way. I wonder if this was due to our outing to the woods or if this is a natural effect of the chemical found in shrooms.
At the woods we headed straight through the middle to hopefully chance on a good spot. Two fluffy dogs appeared from the bushes, ran past us and off out of view in the other direction. More dogs could be heard off in the distance. I imagined a world devoid of humans, ruled by animals, free to take charge of a naked area like this. We sat on a log and the trees changed colours of green and turquoise in front of me. The colours ran deep within my iris. After 10 minutes we decided to venture further in. It's a public pathway and there was many dog walkers around. A gang of kids were constructing something with branches and twigs, troublemaking, yelling for each other from opposite ends of the woods. We sat at the base of a grand old tree, near the quarry where the kids played and near to where a woman in bright pink sat. We sat and tripped.
A few days later I'd overhear an argument over whether there was any further value to psychedelics other than as a party drug. Owen said there wasn't. They were drugs - to trip, to party, get fucked up, mong out. Ben and Lucas disagreed, saying they had therapeutic value. They brought up the old aboriginal tribes that would use mushrooms in religious ceremonies. That they linked to that whole thing of having a spiritual lifestyle. Owen still disagreed: "see, they'd go to these things to get fucked up and think they were seeing god". In the past I'd been more inclined to agree with Owen, while hoping for more from the drugs. But sat in nature, tranquil, with a tripper seemingly after the same enlightening experience I was after, my opinion on the matter started to change. It's the most perfect setting for tripping I've found so far.
I sat looking into the leaves, the trees, the quarry. My head in rapture with endless thoughts. How is someone supposed to describe the thoughts they experience on psychedelics? It's not that you find the grand answers to the world or to life. I'm sure many people, whatever setting, find nothing. Nothing new is placed inside the head. How could it be? Instead what is already in there takes form and shape, becomes more visible for the first time. Everything starts to link up.
After a while we went back to the hunt for another spot. There is an open field outside of the woods and we headed there intending to sit among the flowers and crops and trip. But upon getting to them the flowers looked prickly and heavy and we decided to return to the woods. At the opposite end of the woods from the entrance we found the exact sort of spot we'd been looking for: a small area off the pathway, among the greenery, looking out not only to the field but long into the distance, at hills and faraway houses and train lines. The world looked bigger from this spot. The spot had a cut down tree that mimicked a sofa, it even worked as a back rest and looked outward. It was perfect.
I don't know how long we sat in this spot for. It was a long time. We sat in silence, taking everything in and enjoying our respective trips.
My thoughts in this moment provided a great sense of clarity. I thought about my whole life, all together and in its individual pieces. I felt like I was viewing myself in third person, not my appearance but the timeline of my life. I believe people call this Ego Softening. What did I think about? Any attempt to trap it in words is pointless. Trippers frequently don't share their "epiphanies" leaving the rest of us wondering whether there was any. That's because most of these are personal realisations of the tripper, not world shattering discoveries. I'll try and describe a few threads of thought anyway. I thought about how the "childhood" part of my life, and the "adolescence" part too, were over, that times of staying over at my grandparent's house, fond memories, were just, well... memories. I thought about my separateness from my parents. 18 years living with them then I moved down the country away from them. My my life no longer being Their life. Separate people. Me away doing my own thing. Coming back and leaving again when I want. I'm not on leave from home, here is my home. This here is what I'm doing with my life. The barriers from each section of life, the end of childhood for instance, aren't clear distinctions; all life's events blur from one to the next. The ideas of just who I was were obviously all there, they just hadn't fully formed in my mind yet. It sounds like heavy stuff but the shrooms were still making me uncontrollable grin-levels of giddy.
It wasn't all introspection. I thought about language and its various barriers. Not English specifically but all language. The very concept of creating vibrating sound waves with your mouth in an attempt to communicate to others what is happening within your brain. The sheer inability, even in an intelligent well spoken person, to explain what the hell goes on up there. Trying to explain a drug trip being a good example of these limitations.
The countryside, the understated British idleness of it all, reminded me of the Led Zeppelin album covers. Not a band I'd ever been too crazy about. But the music clicked for me then. I thought about what it must have been like to be young and lost in the 1970s, questioning the world, finding answers creating rock music and exploring psychedelics. Trying to find your way with this old fashioned Britain as a backdrop. It all seemed very relevant to me (minus the creating rock music part).
After a long time we made a plan to buy a 10 bag of weed and got up and left the woods. We headed for town centre as Ben needed to get cash out.
The walk through town centre was another highlight. It was market day - a mass congregation of the elderly. Every face looked distorted. The heads stretched long and smoothed out. All big cone head people. The details of the faces were gone, the wrinkles replaced by exaggerated skin tones; the eyes all sticking out. I imagine that's what it's like for an alien to crashland in Ormskirk town centre: a calm, tranquil scene, made balmy by the alien's inability to recognise the human face like we can. Everything normal but not quite normal. My eyes zoomed into details I'd never normally notice - spiders scuttling across the floor taking up more space than they should. A man speaking into a microphone was translated out into total gibberish. I was an alien visiting and no one noticed.
By the cash machine a woman busking with an acoustic was singing the words to Breezeblocks by Alt-J. A song I've always associated with my first acid trip. The universe was linking up before me.
Our bodies began to make the transition. Ben said he felt nauseous, then sick, then sat drinking water and eyeing up objects on his desk. I wasn't feeling anything yet. We sat watching a video about DMT on Ben's laptop and then I said I was gonna chill in my room while the shrooms took effect.
It all hit me quickly after that.
I started to feel nauseous then sick too. Only I hadn't stayed with Ben long enough to see what the next stage would be. My heart was racing faster and faster - I began to consider it might bloodily launch from my chest. I was pacing back and forth. A drowsiness was sinking into my body. A drowsiness devoid of tiredness or a desire for sleep, only a gravitational pull towards my bed and into a lying position. Nestled into the duvet I started to calm; the effects started to settle onto my brain.
My room's wallpaper is a flower pattern repeated on a white background. The sort of wallpaper you'd find at a grandparent's house but incidentally perfect for tripping. The patterns took on a life of their own, like little slugs, each pulsating into existence through the wall then back out of it again. Everything had an added sparkle to it.
My thoughts began to get intense. Previous psychedelics have pushed my brain to overdrive - lost in my thoughts, forgetting the environment I was in, I'd snap back to reality like waking from a dream. Yet on acid I imagine a Neanderthal banging each thought into my brain with a large rock. On shrooms I pictured a feather in the breeze dancing each thought out of my mind. A lot less intense than acid. I nestled into my bed and lost myself in the cosmos between the sheets. The act of thinking felt like a pleasurable touch on the body. I alternated between enjoying these thoughts and gawking at the visuals. I could have stayed comatose in that spot tripping all day.
I have no idea how long I lay there for. I felt like a different man from the one worriedly pacing around the room. I heard Ben trying to wake Lucas and went outside to see how he was doing. When I saw Ben I broke into laughter - the placement of his eyes and mouth were mixed up on his head. The sight of him wasn't concrete, instead it was as if on his face there was a blindspot on my vision that couldn't be moved and every sight around it had been jumbled up. I tried explaining to him about the visuals, and about the generally merry time I'd been having; he was clearly high but not riding the same wave I was on.
The house felt new to me. My home of seven months. Felt like someone who knew the look of the house but had never inhabited it before. There was a giddy feeling running right through me.
I put on my coat and shoes and we left to head toward the woods. Outside the clouds looked blocky, as if from an 8 bit video game. Me and Ben tried to describe our respective trips to each other to little avail. The visuals of any trip are the easiest part to describe, while the insides of the tripped out mind are a lot harder to communicate. If not impossible. He said he'd recently tripped on acid and this might have upped his tolerance for psychedelics, maybe why he wasn't feeling it as much.
The woods we headed to are past the university. Where we used to smoke weed while we lived on campus. It was a long walk and almost every conversation we had linked to nature in some way. I wonder if this was due to our outing to the woods or if this is a natural effect of the chemical found in shrooms.
At the woods we headed straight through the middle to hopefully chance on a good spot. Two fluffy dogs appeared from the bushes, ran past us and off out of view in the other direction. More dogs could be heard off in the distance. I imagined a world devoid of humans, ruled by animals, free to take charge of a naked area like this. We sat on a log and the trees changed colours of green and turquoise in front of me. The colours ran deep within my iris. After 10 minutes we decided to venture further in. It's a public pathway and there was many dog walkers around. A gang of kids were constructing something with branches and twigs, troublemaking, yelling for each other from opposite ends of the woods. We sat at the base of a grand old tree, near the quarry where the kids played and near to where a woman in bright pink sat. We sat and tripped.
A few days later I'd overhear an argument over whether there was any further value to psychedelics other than as a party drug. Owen said there wasn't. They were drugs - to trip, to party, get fucked up, mong out. Ben and Lucas disagreed, saying they had therapeutic value. They brought up the old aboriginal tribes that would use mushrooms in religious ceremonies. That they linked to that whole thing of having a spiritual lifestyle. Owen still disagreed: "see, they'd go to these things to get fucked up and think they were seeing god". In the past I'd been more inclined to agree with Owen, while hoping for more from the drugs. But sat in nature, tranquil, with a tripper seemingly after the same enlightening experience I was after, my opinion on the matter started to change. It's the most perfect setting for tripping I've found so far.
I sat looking into the leaves, the trees, the quarry. My head in rapture with endless thoughts. How is someone supposed to describe the thoughts they experience on psychedelics? It's not that you find the grand answers to the world or to life. I'm sure many people, whatever setting, find nothing. Nothing new is placed inside the head. How could it be? Instead what is already in there takes form and shape, becomes more visible for the first time. Everything starts to link up.
After a while we went back to the hunt for another spot. There is an open field outside of the woods and we headed there intending to sit among the flowers and crops and trip. But upon getting to them the flowers looked prickly and heavy and we decided to return to the woods. At the opposite end of the woods from the entrance we found the exact sort of spot we'd been looking for: a small area off the pathway, among the greenery, looking out not only to the field but long into the distance, at hills and faraway houses and train lines. The world looked bigger from this spot. The spot had a cut down tree that mimicked a sofa, it even worked as a back rest and looked outward. It was perfect.
I don't know how long we sat in this spot for. It was a long time. We sat in silence, taking everything in and enjoying our respective trips.
My thoughts in this moment provided a great sense of clarity. I thought about my whole life, all together and in its individual pieces. I felt like I was viewing myself in third person, not my appearance but the timeline of my life. I believe people call this Ego Softening. What did I think about? Any attempt to trap it in words is pointless. Trippers frequently don't share their "epiphanies" leaving the rest of us wondering whether there was any. That's because most of these are personal realisations of the tripper, not world shattering discoveries. I'll try and describe a few threads of thought anyway. I thought about how the "childhood" part of my life, and the "adolescence" part too, were over, that times of staying over at my grandparent's house, fond memories, were just, well... memories. I thought about my separateness from my parents. 18 years living with them then I moved down the country away from them. My my life no longer being Their life. Separate people. Me away doing my own thing. Coming back and leaving again when I want. I'm not on leave from home, here is my home. This here is what I'm doing with my life. The barriers from each section of life, the end of childhood for instance, aren't clear distinctions; all life's events blur from one to the next. The ideas of just who I was were obviously all there, they just hadn't fully formed in my mind yet. It sounds like heavy stuff but the shrooms were still making me uncontrollable grin-levels of giddy.
It wasn't all introspection. I thought about language and its various barriers. Not English specifically but all language. The very concept of creating vibrating sound waves with your mouth in an attempt to communicate to others what is happening within your brain. The sheer inability, even in an intelligent well spoken person, to explain what the hell goes on up there. Trying to explain a drug trip being a good example of these limitations.
The countryside, the understated British idleness of it all, reminded me of the Led Zeppelin album covers. Not a band I'd ever been too crazy about. But the music clicked for me then. I thought about what it must have been like to be young and lost in the 1970s, questioning the world, finding answers creating rock music and exploring psychedelics. Trying to find your way with this old fashioned Britain as a backdrop. It all seemed very relevant to me (minus the creating rock music part).
After a long time we made a plan to buy a 10 bag of weed and got up and left the woods. We headed for town centre as Ben needed to get cash out.
The walk through town centre was another highlight. It was market day - a mass congregation of the elderly. Every face looked distorted. The heads stretched long and smoothed out. All big cone head people. The details of the faces were gone, the wrinkles replaced by exaggerated skin tones; the eyes all sticking out. I imagine that's what it's like for an alien to crashland in Ormskirk town centre: a calm, tranquil scene, made balmy by the alien's inability to recognise the human face like we can. Everything normal but not quite normal. My eyes zoomed into details I'd never normally notice - spiders scuttling across the floor taking up more space than they should. A man speaking into a microphone was translated out into total gibberish. I was an alien visiting and no one noticed.
By the cash machine a woman busking with an acoustic was singing the words to Breezeblocks by Alt-J. A song I've always associated with my first acid trip. The universe was linking up before me.
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