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
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.
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