DMT: Second times

Date/Time: Saturday, March 16, 2019 - 4:30 PM, 9:00 PM

Age at time of experience: 45

Weight at time of experience: approx. 184 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

DMT - approx. 30 mg. (smoked), approx. 50 mg. (smoked)

Setting: home

Companions: S

My second night experimenting with DMT, S visited me at my apartment. He’d never done it before and was curious. I, being totally new to this whole thing, was happy to have someone else to do this traveling with. While S and I have spent time around each other with mutual friends, this was the only time we’d ever hung out one-on-one. We talked for a good bit before getting started, debriefing each other about previous psychedelic experiences, what we’d each learned about DMT from reading, and what I’d learned from my previous experiences a week prior. He wasn’t 100% sure he was ready to try it himself but he’d be happy to trip sit me.

I fussed for a minute about the music selection and felt very indecisive about it. I decided to just listen to the same album I listened to the first time I smoked, William Tyler’s “Modern Country.” I loaded up the new oil burner bubbler I’d purchased earlier in the week with about 30 mg. of DMT. I then sat quietly with my eyes closed and did a brief meditation to relax and to clarify my intent. When I felt ready, I sat up and vaporized my dose in two hits using a torch lighter. I felt like my technique kinda sucked as the effects took hold and I knew right away that this was going to be a lighter trip. I closed my eyes, leaned back, and tried not to think too much about it.

I entered the DMT space feeling unsettled, just as I had the last two trips. It was dark in there. My heart and mind raced. The entities were back. As I nervously tried to compose myself, the red humanoids I’ve been calling the “cosmic yogis” spoke to me telepathically. They reminded me to relax and breathe. They said that I should really approach this kind of travel the way I approach mindfulness meditation, focusing on my breathing and letting thoughts come and go. They told me that, if I can learn to relax and maintain a gentle focus, they have many things to show me. The little elf was there too. When I started to open my eyes slightly, he came right up in front of me and gently tugged on my eyelids, gently pulling them back down and giggling. I felt like he was telling me to pay attention to the cosmic yogis and not get distracted. There was another face in there as the DMT started to fade. A vaguely feminine face made of a bunch of interlocking circles. I opened my eyes and when I looked across the living room, I noticed the large mandala tapestry on the wall in my bedroom was moving. I got up and quietly entered my bedroom and watched it for a minute or two. I turned around and looked in the mirror and examined my face. Everything looked normal enough. I went back to the living room.

When I was ready to speak again I picked up a drawing pad and started sketching some of the things I saw for S. He got kind of excited and decided he was gonna go for it. I loaded him up and he went for it. Right from the jump he started laughing nervously and was holding on to the couch for dear life. He made a lot of strange mouth sounds and was drooling on his sweatshirt. It was very funny watching him but I also felt a little sad for him. He seemed like he was trying to fight the weirdness and ground himself. I wished I could help him or steer him into a calmer place but I knew that wouldn’t work so I just quietly observed. After about five minutes, S looked at me and said “Love you, buddy.” As he came out of it he was like, “That’s still here! That’s still here! You’re still here!”

My second time around, I loaded up about 50 mg. into the pipe and this time, when I fired it up, my technique was much better. I watched the crystals melt and become a milky vapor. I pulled slowly for about 20-25 seconds until the vapor suddenly and completely disappeared. I knew I got the whole hit and I was stoked. As I held the hit in, I put the pipe down and held it as the DMT space rushed up on me.

The hit was strong and I felt an intense scrambling. I was nervous but I was doing my best to just breathe and stay focused. One of the cosmic yogis was there. He said, “Relax. I have something to show you.” I said, “OK,” and I leaned my head back. He said, “Here it is.”

Suddenly I was in a bright and evenly lit space where time did not exist. The space was made of a an impossible matter like a diamond-hard yet fluid plastic resin buffed to a glossy finish. This matter was covered in a uniform pattern of small, angular, geometric shapes of orange and purple and black which were slowly and constantly transforming. The white matter too was transforming, making swirls and contours that’s looked something like a flower blooming but more random and complex and unlike anything that exists on earth. I felt like I was given permission to watch the screen saver on God’s mega-quantum computer. I might have said out loud, “I understand.” I’d put whatever this vision was at the top of my list of the most awe-inspiring things I’ve ever seen on psychedelics.

As the intensity started to fade, I opened my eyes. I looked at S and said, “Holy shit.” I might have also said, “Time doesn’t exist.” The room was full of LSD kinds of visuals. Tracers, repeaters, audio distortions. I put my head in my hands and just started saying “oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” I tried to explain what I saw but I just couldn’t find the words. Or rather I found words but they were as inadequate at describing what I saw as this blog entry is. This was like the most hardcore profundity I’ve ever experienced. Far from a guiding voice or even a screaming reproach, this was like a silent universe revealing its complete confounding mystery. An up-close glimpse into the space beyond the white light at the end of the world where all things that are and were and will be come together.

The next day at work, during the slow early part of my bartending shift, I was reading a chapter in Rick Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule and I broke down crying. I want to cry right now writing this. I’ve done a lot of terrestrial traveling in my life and I have experienced the awesome, terrifying, swallow-you-whole beauty of a couple of natural wonders of the world. None made me feel as small as this. I will be returning to the DMT space with all the humility of a beggar kneeling at the doorstep of God.

DMT: First times

Date/Time: Saturday, March 16, 2019 - 4:30 PM, 9:00 PM

Age at time of experience: 45

Weight at time of experience: approx. 187 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

DMT - approx. 50 mg. (smoked - bong), approx. 30 mg. (vaporized - oil burner)

Setting: home

Companions: R, T

Following a technique I learned on DMT Nexus, I did my first ever extraction of DMT from mimosa hostilis root bark. Before this I had never used DMT and didn’t really know where to find it in the wild, so to speak. I did know I would probably want to experiment a lot with it so I just extracted it myself. It was surprisingly easy to do. By the end of the day I had my first crystals with many more to be extracted.

From reading forums, I learned that there are many routes of administration and most of them, because the effect comes on so fast, require some technique. I decided to go with an inexpensive option and bought a cheap, acrylic bong and some mint tea.

R and I convened in my living room and we were both excited and jittery. R went first. I measured out approximately 29 milligrams (my scale only measures in centigrams so I put 0.03 on the scale and removed crystal in tiny amounts until the scale dipped to 0.02). I sandwiched the crystals between beds of mint leaves. Since neither of us knew how he was going to react I was trying too hard to “spot” him and we were both pretty awkward.

When he got his hit, he became still and stared straight ahead for several minutes. He then looked at me and just said, “Interesting.” He then stared straight ahead, sometimes closing his eyes, for another few minutes. When he was able to describe his experience he said he didn’t  hallucinate much and he didn’t leave his body or anything. He said things got very distorted and changed colors and that the space in the middle of my living room was moving in and out, back and forth. He said it was very powerful. We agreed that this was a small dose and definitely inefficiently administered,

About 30 minutes after R took his first hit, I took mine. I measured approximately 49 milligrams for myself and took it the same way. I felt something coming on like a vibration in my ears after blowing out the first hit. When I blew out the second, my body felt like it was being pulled from my sides in opposite directions. My vision started shaking and my heartbeat rushed and I closed my eyes and for a second I got nervous and held my breath and everything went black.

Behind my eyelids, two cross-legged, humanoid entities hovered into my view in a symmetrical formation. They were outlined in red and yellow light and seemed to be slightly transparent. One raised its palm and spoke to me telepathically in a calm tone.

“Relax. Breathe.”

Stunned, I tried to remember how. I gasped and exhaled. The sound of my breath shimmered and reverberated in my ears as if through a wiggling, plastic tube. I took another breath. The entity spoke again, sounding pleased.

“That’s it.”

The two entities started a kind of synchronized hover dance in front of me. I watched it in astonishment for however long I couldn’t tell. I opened my eyes for a second and saw R. When I closed my eyes again, the entities were gone. I told Ryan that I saw people in there. 

The effects faded quickly and I was pretty excited. Entities! I saw entities! I was shaking a little bit at how intense and how brief and how unlike my other psychedelic experiences this was, even if I was sure I didn’t fully get the hit I gave myself. I knew there was much more to see in this space.

Later that evening, T came over. He said he was gonna bring his rig over. We’d previously had a conversation where we’d talked about vaping DMT dissolved in polypropylene glycol with a box mod so that’s what I was expecting. His rig was actually a crack bubbler and that made much more sense to me. This time I went first.

My technique was still wrong but when I blew out my second hit, lift-off happened in the exact same rumbling, shuddering way as the first time. When I closed my eyes I was flying smoothly through a dark space. The red beings from the earlier trip were flying all around me - under my arms, between my legs, around my head. Their movements were almost aquatic, like dolphins. One of them made faces at me and waved his hands around. Above me and all around was a sky made of uniform yet constantly transforming, angular, geometric shapes in orange and purple and black. I felt like the entities were playing with me and welcoming me into their world. A distance off from them was a little gnome-like creature hiding behind something like a door. He was covering his mouth, pointing and giggling at me.

I don’t know how long I was flying through this space before I opened my eyes. I saw T on the other end of the couch but I could also still see traces of the entities with my eyes open. I said, “Hang on. They’re still here.” I closed my eyes for a few more minutes until they started to fade.

I was really stoked that I saw the same entities again and had a different experience. Like we’re building a rapport or something. I also felt very small knowing that, despite my awe, I really haven’t seen much of anything in the spice world yet. 

I learned a few things that day. One is that DMT doesn’t seem to enhance music in the way LSD or mushrooms do. The music we listened to was very low and ambient and unobtrusive and I can’t really see it being any other way aside from not having music at all. The music just kind of got sucked into the deep background and I was glad it was mellow. The idea of using this molecule at a party with lots of people and loud music seems like a horrifying idea to me. 

Another was that, similar to my experiences with mushrooms and LSD, I got a feeling from the experience that spoke very much to practicing meditation. While mushrooms and LSD tend to put me in a state that’s almost like perfected meditation, DMT seems more like it wants you to enter the experience in a state of meditation to properly get something out of it. Like meditation, it takes practice.

Expect a lot of entries like this.

Mushrooms: Rookie Move Heroism, Dimensional Birth, and Unconditional Kindness

Date/Time: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 - 2:07 PM

Age at time of experience: 45

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 187 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

Mushrooms - 11.1 grams

Cannabis - vape pen distillate
Caffeine - 2 cups of black tea

Setting: home

Companions: solo

From December 18, 2018 until March 13, 2019, I conducted my first ever PF Tek-style Psilocybe cubensis grow. I made a pretty sloppy go of it and knowingly made a bunch of mistakes throughout the whole process. With most new endeavors in my life I have a habit of testing how much laziness and fuckery I can get away with right from the start. So, predictably, by the end of this 3-month project I had a pretty solid “Contam Tek” going in my fruiting chamber. Still, these shrooms were just for my personal use and I’m totally the type of person that’ll cook and eat food that’s clearly a bit over the “spoiled” edge so as to not waste it. I decided to just desiccate the hell out of the mushrooms with a food dehydrator and keep my whole harvest.

I didn’t have to wake up on Wednesday because I never actually fell asleep on Tuesday. I have insomnia often. I gave up trying to sleep at around 7 AM and began my day. I wrote a few pages in my journal while I was still in bed. I then did my meditation before showering and doing the previous evening’s dishes.

I hadn’t taken a psychoactive dose of any psychedelics in about 6 weeks and it was feeling like time. Coincidentally, I just started reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and doing the course work. One of the things the book tells you to do every week is take yourself on an “Artist Date” where you go out and do something by yourself that feeds your creative spirit. I decided that chilling at home and taking a hearty dose of my own mushrooms was going to be this week’s Artist Date. It might not be going out but, you know, it’s totally going OUT.

I’d made this dubstep/bass music/electro playlist a few days earlier but I decided that this was gonna be too harsh for today since I hadn’t slept. Before I ate my dose, I made a new playlist of Hindustani classical music because I tend to really like the drones when I’m tripping. I put 5.41 grams through my coffee grinder with the intention of making tea but then realized I didn’t have any lemon or ginger in the house. In a very “fuck it” kind of way I took 2000 milligrams of Vitamin C and then just toss-and-washed the powdered mushrooms down like I was taking the Cinnamon Challenge or something. It was kinda gnarly. I needed a lot of water to get it all out of my mouth and throat.

I’ve been doing some re-evaluating of my relationship with cannabis lately and I decided to not smoke this trip. I made a cup of sweet black tea with milk and went to my living room to chill on the couch. I put my playlist on and read random pages of Be Here Now by Ram Dass for a little bit as a sort of casual mindset preparation. I also played “laser pointer” with my cat which always makes me laugh.

About 40 minutes later I wasn’t feeling anything at all. I thought this was really unusual since my stomach was empty when I ate the powdered mushrooms. I didn’t really take into consideration that I almost always make tea with shrooms and today I didn’t. At 3 PM, I ate another 0.76 grams. At 3:27 PM, thinking that 3/4 of a gram wasn’t really raising the stakes by much, I ate another 2.37 grams, majorly upping the ante.

Over the next hour, the come-up was still barely happening. I started to get really disappointed with myself. I thought, “Well, shit...I just grew the lamest mushrooms I’ve ever eaten.” I laid on my couch under a blanket and watched for signs behind my closed eyelids. Occasionally, I would see little dappled flashes of fluorescent colors but I sort of dismissed them as my eyes adjusting to light. At 4:24 PM, was convinced my produce was bunk and that nothing was gonna happen. I decided to eat 2.6 grams more, bringing my total dose to 11.1 grams, the second highest dose I’d ever taken. I sat at my desk for a few minutes and played with this fractal app on my iPad but it soon made me feel vertiginous.

At 4:37 PM, resigned to thinking my mushroom grow and thus today’s trip were total failures, I reversed my decision to not use cannabis and started hitting my vape pen. The come up queasiness faded a bit and the playlist I had on started getting on my nerves. I sat up to change the music and I felt that feeling. The feeling that I’d been waiting for. The feeling I call “the slide.” I took a note on my phone: “Finally very high 4:49”

I changed the music to Aoxomoxoa by The Grateful Dead and closed my eyes. By the end of “St. Stephen” I was in a completely immersed in glowing color chaos. Far beyond my experiences in “Tron Valhalla”, this was like being inside the sun. With my eyes closed and swiveling my head side to side, I was enveloped in dazzling light. The light eventually revealed itself to be an enormous celestial vulva that I was being born from. Colossal labia made of flashing multi-colored stars undulated lazily as I drifted down to my couch. Later I’d find a note I took in my phone: “The point if [sic] contact the infinite glide Dimensional birth with vulva.”

Over the loud music, I heard the advisor voice of the mushrooms which I’ve heard several times before. It spoke for a long time. It gently assured me that they were fine and strong. That even though I wasn’t as attentive or careful as I could’ve been I still did well for my first time growing them. Then it started to advise me on what I might pay more attention to next time I grow. It told me that I should take care of them like I would take care of myself. That if I respect them and their growth, I might respect my own growth more.

At some point, Aoxomoxoa ended and I needed to put something else on. I don’t really go in much for jam band stuff but the Dead had treated me really well today. More than once recently I’ve heard something I didn’t recognize in a bar, liked it, asked what it was, and was embarrassed to learn it was Phish . After struggling with Google for what felt like an eternity over the question, “What is the best Phish album?” (I never got an answer), I eventually put on Billy Breathes. I first felt like I made a mistake but then just let go and eventually got into it.

I then had a legitimate out-of-body experience. I saw myself leave my body, look down at it and then fly. I’d experienced lucid dreaming and “astral projection” only a few times in my life but only by accident or through using self-hypnosis apps. I flew through the roof, up my street, and then just cruised around my neighborhood. For whatever reason, I stuck to the roads in this flight. At times the air changed consistency and what I was doing became more like swimming. At one point I was flying through air made of wet, black, empty, plastic leaf bags and the sidewalks were covered in used condoms like they were wet, autumn leaves. I kicked some around and they limply sloshed.

When Billy Breathes ended, I decided to change gears entirely and put The Man-Machine by Kraftwerk on. You wouldn’t think of Kraftwerk as psychedelic at all but, during my previous acid trip, “We Are The Robots” played and it sounded so good. I decided to go in for the whole album.

Back on my couch, some representative containment of my consciousness was experiencing this feeling of variable tonicity. It would fill up and I would be pressed against it’s flexible, semi-porous walls. Then the saturation would change and the walls would slacken and sag and drooped all over me like a tarpaulin. Sound and vision flowed through a semi-porous barrier. I felt like I was in a cell moving through a stream, bouncing up against others and exchanging pieces of each other osmotically.

After Kraftwerk I thought, “What is the opposite of Kraftwerk in the 70’s pop spectrum?” In that moment the answer was Bread. I’ve never listened to a full Bread album so I arbitrarily chose Baby I’m a Want You. I thought it would be really funny. It actually was just beautiful and warm.

For a time I saw myself on a small, light hovercraft racing around Tron Valhalla with glee. The roads of Tron Valhalla led me to a bunch of portals showing me memories. I got the idea that I might be able to find the answers to my past. I wanted to know what traumas I could unlock, what abuses I could uncover, that would explain the problems I have in my normal life. I followed halls down to visualizations of memories that weren’t even my own. I had a bunch of visions of my parents and got really angry at them. I was crying and asking them why they ever bothered having me if they were just going to neglect my obvious and simple needs. It occurred to me that neglecting the simple needs of growing children was the same thing I’d done for much of my mushroom grow. I charged through the halls of Tron Valhalla banging on doors only to find nothing true. I screamed out, “Show me! Show me the lie at the center! Show me the original hurt! The violation at the core!” I exhausted myself and I knew I wouldn’t be shown. I bawled and bawled and gave up.

Baby I’m a Want You ended and, seeing a suggestion on my streaming service I put on Atomic Bomb by William Onyeabor even though I didn’t really know what he was about. I just liked the cover photo. I loved the ticky-tacky keyboards and the funky bass. The second track, “Better Change Your Mind”, was amazing and played to my ears like an epic anti-war-as-ego death anthem.

The voice of the mushrooms came back and told me it understood. It knew why I wanted to know why I have the problems I have and why my parents were the way they were with me. Life has pain and it all comes from somewhere and maybe if I can find and zoom in on these core traumas I could destroy them. But it also said my needing all the answers before moving on and living a life I feel is authentic might just be a bunch of ego bullshit. That maybe just being kind and loving for the sake of it would be easier than putting a condition on kindness like I feel had been done with me. That maybe mine could be the kindness and compassion that heals us all.

By the end of the album, I had mostly descended. The house was still. I almost turned on my TV and then thought better of it. It was still pretty early, around 9 or 9:30 PM. I was drained but felt great. Cleansed. I put the kettle on and poured a bowl of cereal. I poured the milk and then got distracted and forgot about the cereal for a few minutes. When I remembered it again I was worried it would be soggy but it just had the perfect crunchy/soggy level. I had this thought that I got the cereal at the perfect crunchiness through “feminine intuition” which made me laugh out loud. I finished eating my cereal in contemplative silence, turned off the lights, and went to bed.

Mushrooms: Diagnostics and Maintenance in Tron Valhalla

Date/Time: March, 2018/approx. 10:30 PM

Age at time of experience: 44

Weight at time of experience: Approx. 195 lbs.

Substances/Doses:

Mushrooms - 4 grams (tea)

Cannabis - smoked

Escitalopram - 5 mg. (prescribed daily taper dose)

Setting: at home

Companions: solo

I was very enthusiastic going into this one. About six weeks prior I’d had a really profound, unambiguous, entheogenic experience on 5.5 grams. I wanted to hear the voice again.

I straightened up my apartment, did all my dishes, made my bed, and lit my room only in white Christmas lights. I made a musical playlist entirely of Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, or both of them together. The music choices were based not on familiarity or suggestion. I’d never really spent much time intently listening to either artist. I just knew that I wanted the music to be instrumental and stimulating but not harsh or aggressive.

I put 4 grams of mushrooms through a coffee grinder and then made a hot tea, double-steeping the powder with lemon-ginger tea bags for a total of approximately 30 minutes. I don’t remember what (if?) I’d eaten earlier in the day but when I drank the tea, my stomach was empty. After chugging it down (and also eating the spent mushroom paste) I took a couple of of bong hits and then a hot shower. I then dressed in clothes that were comfortable enough to lay around in but presentable enough to go out in public wearing just in case the unexpected need or urge to do so arose. 

Around 11 PM the familiar, queasy waves of the come-up were reaching a giddy intensity. My vision felt sharpened and I decided it was time to lay down and settle into this trip. I took a couple of hits off my bowl, coughed a little and took a drink of water. I then put my headphones on, and laid down on my bed, and pressed play on my remote. I closed my eyes.

Almost instantaneously, as the first long run across the sitar began the first raga I listened to, my consciousness seemed to slide right into a vision of the alien landscape I’d seen in my previous “heroic” dose. The place I now refer to as the TRON VALHALLA. I chuckled a little at how this soundtrack and this effortless transition into a visionary state seemed almost like a cliche of a Beatles-era cinematic representation of the psychedelic experience. My critique immediately receded when I heard THE voice say, “Welcome back.” I found myself not looking out over the Tron Valhalla from above like my previous experience but flying around in it as if in a small spacecraft without any visible controls or containment structure. The smooth, alien surface of the structures that hurtled past my vision seemed illuminated by a black light that came from nowhere. They were covered in swirling, complex, geometric patterns in a color palette of pastel blues, pinks, whites, and purples. The raga pulsed in my ears and I felt like every note of the sitar or the tabla was essentially connected to my being and to whatever was propelling me around this space, stimulating my flight and exciting my mood. I remember physically feeling cool and comfortable, even though I had no conscious sense of my actual body. Awed, I watched this science fiction-like spectacle unfolding all around me. I felt that I was not alone in this space and I did not fear this presence.

The focus of my vision shifted from the passing landscape of the Tron Valhalla to a point closer to me. A series of lights in a scrolling grid pattern materialized before me as if on a pop-up display except without any physical monitor. A pair of metal hands with long, articulated fingers appeared in front of this display. I’m not sure if the voice said anything about it but I remember feeling like I understood that I was under examination. The examination wasn’t intrusive but more like when you go to the mechanic and they hook their diagnostic computer up to your car. I remember a voice saying something like, “OK! Let’s see what we’ve got here!” 

In deft, effortless movements, the metal fingers began flicking through these lights. I could physically feel this tickling of the metal fingers inside my brain like a vibration or a really low level electrical current. Sometimes the lights would be flicked away by the fingers, others were pulled to the side, some others got something that looked like a little massage before being scrolled past. In a way it was like my first time ever watching the “Repair Permissions” utility run on my Mac’s hard drive. I didn’t understand any of the process or the what the reports meant but I could see that errors were being noted, isolated, and - if possible - repaired. It felt like I was being worked on at some kind of alien brain health spa. I remember laughing and saying out loud, “How could anyone think this is bad for you?!”

The diagnostics check faded away and I was then presented with a new series of visions - seemingly curated by the metal fingers - all of which carried with them more-or-less explicit suggestions for me.

First there was a vision that contained percussively hammering flying objects. Vintage metal typewriters were flying in a swirling, flowing formation like a swarm of oversized, intently working insects. Their type bars hammering down on spinning ink ribbons, printed pages flying from whirring platens and fluttering away like leaves in a breeze. In the same formation there were drums being struck by drumsticks and hammers striking metal. But the dominant images and sounds were the keystrokes in the flying typewriters, the cylinders throwing off sheets, and the ringing of carriage return bells. I felt a strong implication that I need to be creating art and music and writing and that I’ve always known that that’s what I need to be doing.

Next, I had a vision of myself in an earnest conversation with my long-time boss. For many years we were close friends outside of work. In recent years our friendship had grown distant and our work relationship fraught (for me, anyway). I’d spent many nights stewing over this and much effort avoiding dealing with these problems directly. But then there he was in my trip and we were sorting it out. In this vision I felt safe to felt safe to take ownership of my side of our issues. I don’t remember the words that were exchanged in this conversation but the tone was healing and positive. 

Lastly, I had a vision of me with my family. I’ve always had issues with my parents and for many years I was estranged from my entire family. In this vision, I was at a family gathering of a loudness and warmth that hadn’t been remotely approximated since the death of my my maternal grandfather 15 years ago. I was sitting at my parents’ dining room table and I broke down in tears in front of all of them. I told them how sad I was and how disconnected I’ve always felt, both from them and from myself. How, as we all grow older, it just gets sadder and sadder for me to feel like I’m not allowed to have an authentic relationship with any of them. I sobbed and sobbed. I remember feeling something like an embrace come over me but, when I think now about what I saw, I don’t remember this embrace coming from anyone in the room with me. I just felt unafraid of my pain and had a feeling that accepting myself was the way through my family issues.

The visions started to fade but the strong emotions stayed with me for a while. For the rest of this trip, I remained prone on my bed and I cried. I felt very tempted to call both my boss and/or my mother on the telephone but I thought better of it. It was past 2:00 AM and these calls would have made either of them really worried. Part 3 of Philip Glass’s “Music In 12 Parts” was playing and, for the first time in this trip, I got distracted and annoyed by the music. I turned it off and put another Ravi Shankar album on. 

By the time the mushrooms had mostly worn off, I was done crying and felt completely drained. I got up and it felt very still in my apartment. My cat, who’d been outside my bedroom door the whole time had a spooked look in her eyes. I was also really hungry and I ordered a bacon-cheeseburger with fries and a milkshake from a diner. This choice seems a little incongruous with having just had a spiritual experience but I guess old habits die hard. I went to bed soon after eating.