Date/Time: early February, 2018/approx. 10 PM
Age at time of experience: 44
Weight at time of experience: Approx. 200 lbs.
Substances/Doses:
Mushrooms - 5.5 grams
Cannabis - a few bong hits
Escitalopram - 10 mg. (daily prescription)
Setting: home
Companions: (none)
I needed to know what a “heroic dose” of psilocybin mushrooms was like. In 2018, I found out and then I found out a few more times. I’ll never forget any of those trips but the first one changed everything for me. It is the main reason I’ve started this blog.
While I didn’t go into this trip with a serious, mindful intent, I was still hoping it would be therapeutic in some way. I’d been feeling pretty low and worn out by my lifestyle. My nocturnal job and the overworked schedule I’d kept at it had been messing with my head and depleting my Vitamin D on me for years. I’d been abusing alcohol hard and steadily for a decade and I was having trouble denying it anymore. I’d been on SSRIs for most of the decade but I knew they were just mitigating the fallout of my near-constant hangover, keeping me functional in my constant, low-grade depression. I’d gained a lot of weight. I wasn’t sleeping well. I felt lonely and alienated. I decided to go dry for February and see if I couldn’t put a little order to my messy life, or at least lose a couple of beer pounds.
When I woke up on the day of this experience I took my daily escitalopram prescription of 10 milligrams. I hadn’t drank for a few days. I hadn’t eaten any food in at least 6 hours prior to dosing and, even then, I’d only had a croissant and a cup of coffee. I took this dose sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 PM on either the first or second Saturday of the month. It had been slow at work and I’d cut out around 9:30 PM. I went home and consumed all the mushrooms I had left, 5.5 grams. I almost always make tea from mushrooms but I can’t remember if I did on this occasion. Considering the gastrointestinal discomfort I experienced late in the trip, I think I probably ate them dry.
I set my VHS player and my headphones up with the 1940 Disney classic, Fantasia. I’d seen this movie once before in 1990 when it had it’s 50th Anniversary theatrical release. I was a junior in high school, I was with friends, and was on 4 hits of acid. The choice of re-watching this seems strange to me writing this now since my memories of the previous time are pretty superficial. I smoked a little weed and puttered around the apartment while waiting for the come up.
When the effects of the mushrooms started their queasy, tidal rush in my stomach and chest, I pressed play, put my headphones on, and leaned back. My eyesight isn’t great so I was watching with a pair of dirty reading glasses because that was all I had at the time. As I the movie started, the distortions and the low fidelity of VHS made me feel nostalgic. The colors seemed hazy and saturated. I wondered when the last time I actually listened to classical music had been before this because it felt so satisfying now. I noticed myself grinning ear-to-ear in the darkness. I sat up and started to wave my outstretched arms in focused circles from my shoulders. There was something like an athletic warmup about it. An energy started to pass through me that felt like liquid waves of “YES.” I started rotating my neck in circles. It felt like my head and my whole body were rubbing up against a membrane that had the whole of the universe on the other side of it as if I was wearing my existence like a glove or it was enveloping me. When I blinked my eyes while moving my head, images I saw with my eyes open would smear and become fixed behind my eyelids.
Maybe 15 or 20 minutes into Fantasia, I noticed that what I saw when my eyes were closed was much more in focus - and much more compelling - than what I saw on my TV screen. I decided to take off my dingy readers and close my eyes. My field of vision was filled with visions of a very complex, constantly changing flow of three-dimensional geometric patterns swirling around in deep, pastel hues of purple, blue, and pink with veins of white. They existed in a space that seemed galactic in scope.
Occasionally, I’d open my eyes and see my actual living room. One of those times I saw the ballet-dancing hippos in the “Dance of the Hours” section of Fantasia and laughed and though, “Oh right! That’s happening!” It felt silly to be seeing with my eyes open. I felt like I was pulling back curtains and peeking in on someone. I guess, in a sense, I was. When I closed my eyes again, I’d return to this expansive other space with the swirling colors and patterns. I felt myself starting to float freely around this space. Eventually, my vantage point rose to a great height and then backwards so that I was ultimately looking out over something that left me awestruck.
In my closed eye vision I was surveying a vast, alien landscape. It seemed simultaneously natural and technological, as if there were no difference between the two. There were peaks and valleys, buildings and spires. There were vehicles on roads and in the air. The sky was dark over this pulsing, fluid, moving tableau but everything in it had its own internal light that was neither sharp nor diffuse but retained a pastel neon glow. It looked like a scene out of some kind of combined fantasy and science fiction mythology mixed with early-Netherlandish landscape paintings. I now refer to this space as the TRON VALHALLA.
A voice spoke. I felt its giant presence but saw no physical form. I don’t really remember what the voice sounded like but it seemed to come from a singular mind and from everywhere near and far. It was fatherly but not anything like my actual father. More like some kind of giant oracle. It was relaxed, confident, graceful, and undemanding. It was clear to me that it only had loving, understanding, and healing intentions.
While I can’t remember much of what the voice said verbatim, I remember its message. The voice told me that the space that I was looking out over was mine, that it had always been mine and that it will always be mine. It told me that in this space I am the same as god and I am free to be exactly what I am. It told me that I could return to this space whenever I want to. It told me that this space is actually all around me all the time and that I am the same as god in that space as well. It told me that none of the barriers that I feel up against in my life really exist because everything I think of as “reality” or “life” were just illusions. It told me that everything that I have ever had a true drive to do could be achieved. It told me that all the things that I’ve ever done in my life that keep me from being in a peaceful state are no longer necessary. There is only one sentence the voice said that I remember in full.
“You don’t need to do the shit that sucks anymore.”
I knew exactly what the voice was talking about. There was a lot of shit I was doing that sucked. The drunken rage and violence. The multi-day hangovers spent in bed just regretting everything. The up-all-night seething with silent resentments. The empty, habitual, narcissistic, and mindless time-wasting and procrastinating. The unattended health issues. The secrets and the lies and the keeping up appearances of being “OK.” The things said and done that can’t be taken back.
In that moment, I felt a feeling of what it might be like to not do any of the shit that sucks. Not to do any of the things that sap me of my mental, emotional, and physical energy. I felt what it might be like to be free of all of that and actually live a fully genuine life, accepting of others and accepting of myself. It might have been the most sane and whole and true and at peace I’ve felt in my entire life. I was happy.
I’m not sure how long this went on for. Feeling the normal passage of time and the normal experience of my living space had fully disappeared for a while. I was completely wrapped up in this cathartic sense of coming together and wholeness. Eventually, I felt the vision fading and I got very sad because I worried I would lose connection to this moment and never experience anything like it again. I don’t know if I said it aloud or not but I pleaded with the voice not to leave me and that I was afraid. It reassured me as it was drifting away that it has always been with me, it is always with me, and will always be with me. It told me I don’t need to be afraid because what I see as “me” and whatever I think of as “god” are the same thing. It’s said I can do anything I really want to do.
When the movie ended and the soundtrack in my headphones faded away, so did the otherworldly voice and visions. I got up from my couch and turned on the lights. Despite only a little under two hours having passed, in that moment I felt like this trip had been epic but was essentially over. I felt moved to go about straightening things up in my apartment. The trip, however, was clearly not done with me. At one point I was in the middle of my kitchen, staring up into one of the recessed lightbulbs in the ceiling, completely entranced by it for who knows how long, only to snap out of it and find myself holding my cat’s full litter box in my hands. I laughed at myself and was like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this right now?” Nonetheless, I somehow finished the job of cleaning the litter box. I don’t remember how long this strangely distracted straightening up went on or what else I did.
At some point I started to have really bad abdominal pains. I remember rolling around on the couch dealing with that, hoping it would pass soon. I went to the bathroom and took a seat on the toilet. The gas pains became so great at one point that I thought I was going to pass out. I didn’t really get too scared by it but it wasn’t pleasant. I laid down on the floor so that I wouldn’t fall down if I lost consciousness. Eventually the pain passed. I got up, took a huge shit and felt relieved.
Despite having just experienced this unpleasantness in my guts, I was really hungry. I hadn’t really eaten much all day and this trip took a lot of energy. Despite my better judgement, I used a delivery app to order a bacon cheeseburger deluxe and a milkshake from a diner. I don’t remember what I did while I was waiting for its delivery but when it arrived I wolfed it down. I felt like I’d made a bit of a mindless and decadent choice in food considering the spiritual experience I just had but I didn’t get too down on myself for it. Soon after, I was tired. I smoked a little more pot and went to bed.
In the week following this trip, something opened up in me. I found myself reassessing all aspects of my life and how I was living it. I kept thinking about what the voice had said to me. While I generally don’t go in for thinking like this, I felt that I’d heard the voice of some kind of god consciousness. The words from this “divine voice” all rang true to me and I decided that I ought to take them seriously.
In the first couple of months that followed this experience I purged a bunch of pieces of furniture from my apartment that felt like they had bad vibes from my past trapped in them. I built a desk. I hung a bunch of wall art and started a weird art project. I sold a large collection of vintage concert t-shirts for a few thousand dollars, opened a savings account with the money, and planned a vacation. I made a decision to cut my bartending schedule so that I could spend more time creating things and seeking things that feel truer to me.
Over the rest of the year I saw my use of chemicals I see as anesthetic decrease significantly. I tapered down my dosage of my antidepressants until it felt safe to cease them altogether. As of this writing I’ve been off escitalopram for 9 months. I saw my alcohol consumption radically drop. I put it this way because it feels like it just happened, not because I willed it to happen. Before this trip, I drank 4-10+ drinks a day, 4-7 nights a week, for about 10 years. In the last 5 months, I’ve consumed alcohol no more than 10 times, mostly out of perceived social pressure. The last time I drank was New Years Eve and I was crippled with depression for three days afterward. Drinking just doesn’t seem to work for me in the ways it used to and I just don’t feel moved to do it. Even my cannabis consumption decreased to a small but noticeable degree.
What this pile of mushrooms did is nothing short of miraculous to me. They healed a piece of my spirit and I can feel my body following along with it. I think there may be a lot more for me to learn in this way and I feel a responsibility to pass on what I find to the community. Here we are.
An earlier version of this report was previously published in the Erowid Experience Vaults at erowid.org under the title: “Grand Reception At Tron Valhalla.”
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