Bad Trips Are Kinda My Thing: Cyanascens Fear Tripping/Getting Shut Out of the DMT Realm

An acquaintance unloaded a bag of Psilocybe cyanescens mushrooms on me over the summer. Their potency freaked him out. There were six 0.25 gram microdose capsules and 3.8 grams of loose shrooms in the bag. I tend to think stronger is always better and asked why he doesn’t just take less until he figures out the right dosage for himself. He was spooked and just wasn’t having it. I was happy to take them off his hands and gave him an equal quantity of Golden Teacher Psilocybe cubensis in trade because I had a bunch.

My first experience with these mushrooms was a very low dose experience. At a party last fall, I ate two of the  microdose caps (0.5 g.) and gave the rest of them away. It was pretty light and didn’t really give me much of a feel for their potency.

On Saturday, February 1, I was going to smoke DMT in the early afternoon but I chickened out at the last minute, as I do so often. I don’t know what I am so afraid of with DMT and it’s kinda getting stupid. In a recent DMT experience, an entity met me in the waiting room and said to me, “You’re not afraid of me...you’re afraid of YOU!” It’s really the truth. I’ve never had a bad experience on DMT and it usually makes me feel better about my life. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m afraid because I don’t really know what feeling good about my life would look like.  

Instead, I figured I’d take shrooms and if I was feeling frisky I’d smoke that DMT while tripping. I’d done that a few weeks before and the effects were pretty great. I brewed a tea with the cyanascens. I figured if they are close to twice as potent as cubes, and 3.5 grams of cubes is typically a good, hard trip dose for me, then 1.82 grams would be fine. My house was pretty tidy so I didn’t really need to prep much. I took a shower, got dressed in fresh clothes, and smudged the house with sage.

I drank the tea and ate the mushroom mush at 5:56 PM. I went to my couch and started an episode of Planet Earth, which has been a go to thing I do during my come-ups for a long time. Doing that this time felt a little tired and I thought that maybe I need to come up with a more novel ritual in the future. Instead of the narration, I put on an album called “Futha” by a band called Heilung that I’d been turned onto recently. It’s dark, droney, Nordic weirdness and I like it a lot.

Over the next 30 minutes the body load seeped into all my muscles in a drowsy, heavy way. There was no impulse for fight or flight, I just wanted it to take me. I’d made a note in my phone that I just wanted to feel some healing for my lonely sadness. I wanted to find the love inside me because I’d been feeling really cut off from it. Quickly, watching the television became a stupid waste of energy.

I noted in my phone that, once again, mushrooms feel really different after having experienced DMT. Thinking about it later, I don’t know. I’ve had a lot of high dose mushroom experiences at this point and maybe the recreational doses just don’t do it for me anymore. At least not when I’m alone as I usually am.

While we’re on that subject, it really needs to be stated: I really need to trip with others sometime soon. Being a solo psychonaut has its positives but sometimes it really puts a fine point on the loneliness I feel much of the time. I miss the madcap laughs of tripping balls with a friend. Anyway....

“6:35: Tears, the displaying and the swiping, it’s different than it was, is the lesson different,” I noted and then at 7:21, my final note taken during the trip: “so frustrated and sad.” I curled up on the couch and clenched my eyes closed. Tears were running down my face as blotchy, liquid light show visuals erupted inside my head. Purple and pink and paisley splatters coming from space beyond space. 

This trip quickly oriented its focus on looking at the fear and deprivation in the hearts of all of the men in my family tree and their resultant inability to know real love. Scenes from my childhood where I needed to be seen and cared for but instead was left alone or threatened with punishment. Scenes of my brother’s childhood and the triangulated separation forced upon us. Theories of the histories of my father’s and my uncles’ childhoods that have been hidden from me and suppressed all my life, and the childhood of their father. Visions of the possibilities of my young nephew’s later life. A multi-generational moving picture of motherly squandered selfishly fussing over the unreasonable needs jealous, needy, rage-filled men. Fatherly protection selfishly spent only on maintaining bogus personae and illusions of control that always evade their grasp. Images of germinating sperm gestating into adulthood and old age and death in a fractal of space and time. Repeating processes of victimization and terror. Futile pleas for change in an absence of honest awareness.

I rocked back and forth and knew in my heart that I have always lived in constant fear and that I have never truly understood how to love another human being. I felt the selfishness in my heart and the incredible need for love and protection that no one ever gave me and that I’m not sure if I will ever be able to receive even if it were offered. I wished for my mother. Not my actual biological mother but the mother she should have been. The mother that should have showed me love instead of using me as a replacement source for the love she couldn’t get from my father. I wept and wept.

It was at this point that I remembered the “Motherly Spirit” from DMT experiences I’ve had over the last year. The feminine figure that held me and fussed over me and told me “It’s ok. It’s ok. It’s ok.” I thought to myself that maybe I should go try to see her. That maybe she could show me how to love. I got it in my head that if I visited the DMT realm with this urgent need that the entities might provide. I lifted my crying, sweaty, and cold body from the couch, wrapped myself in a blanket, and moved to my bedroom

Cross-legged on my bed in my room lit only with white Christmas lights, the tears ran down my face as I brought the vaporizer to my lips. I pulsed the power button as drew the strange yet familiar fragrance of alien flowers and new sneakers into my lungs. I exhaled and pulled again, silently chanting “show me how to love…show me how to love” as I embraced myself for my entry into the realm.

It didn’t happen. Instead there was a feeling of shock and surprise as sudden and jarring as a cold glass of water thrown in my face. My previously earthy, mournful mood turned instantly into something much more blank, clinical, severe. I looked around my room and thought, “What happened?” 

A small object floated into my view above my bed. I guess I’d call it a nugget. The nugget looked like a piece of the white swirl stamped with geometry and language that contains the gears of the universe that I frequently see in my DMT trips. But it wasn’t the ineffable matter of the infinite; it was like a black-and-white, three-dimensional facsimile of it. I was confused. Why was it there? Why was I not inside it? What is going on?

Then I saw something radically different from anything I’d ever seen on any psychedelic. From a space well past the far wall of my bedroom, an enormous jumble of images, objects, idea-forms started rushing up. As they got closer they all took on the appearance of mid-century space-age kitsch design elements. It was like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse threw up in outer space. It all came barreling toward me until suddenly it all went SPLAT in a space right in front of me, as if there was a two-foot-thick wall of glass between me and it. All the strange images stopped suddenly and then oozed down the invisible barrier like Wile E. Coyote after slamming into a mountainside with a tunnel painted on it by the Roadrunner.

And then there was a voice, the booming telepathic voice of wisdom from the psychedelic beyond. And it gave its answer to my request to see the Mother, to be shown how to love:

“NO.”

And then an admonition:

“GO TO THERAPY.”

I was crestfallen. The sadness of this rejection by the realm was just too much. I curled up in a ball and cried hard, defeated tears. I knew I’d really fucked up. 

I’ve been on the receiving end of the stern hand of the psychedelic voice before. It’s always happened when I’ve entered into the realm with expectations of specific results. The first time I got the psychic smackdown was on 7.5 grams of mushrooms. I wanted to revisit the space I’d been in on my previous couple of trips. The voice boomed at me: “YOU DON’T GET TO CHOOSE HOW IT GOES IN MY ABODE.” But here I was again trying to demand what the lesson was to be and being soundly rebuked. I felt so foolish.

After about a half hour of sobbing and feeling stupid, the fever of my personal shame broke and I was able to sit up and open my eyes. I needed to pee and so I did that. It was 8:15, a little over 2 hours after I ate the mushrooms, and after what I’d been through I felt like it couldn’t hurt to look at my text messages (I silence my phone when I trip). A friend had sent me a text wanting to make amends to me for a wrong that I hadn’t called him on and which I’m not sure he even fully understood. After spending two hours in the depths of my fears, I was fully prepared to have the difficult conversation that was to follow.

The rest of the night was pretty weird and uncomfortable because I was out socializing with alcohol-drinking normies in bars. Being on mushrooms around drunk people really shines a big light on the stupidity and egotism of alcohol consumption. Even when they're nice, it all comes off as a bunch of stupid bullshit. I kind of regretted ever looking at my phone in the first place. At least I arrived at a solution for the problem that my friend foist upon me a few weeks prior.

Sobriety: Did I Even Do This?

I have not had a drink since December 31, 2018.

I haven’t talked much about this here because in a way I didn’t feel like it was relevant. However, I’m not sure this blog would be here if it weren’t for giving up drinking. I doubt I would have let alcohol go if it hadn’t been for psychedelics. Why did I think this wasn’t relevant?

For one, I have a hard time calling my lifestyle “sobriety.” Before my 11-year bender, I spent a third of my life “clean and sober” in a 12-step fellowship and part of me still sees the concept of sobriety that way. My current lifestyle would not fly if I was still running with that crowd. It seems so stupid. I was hopelessly and aggressively addicted to nicotine for all 15 years that I spent in that fellowship. Most of my friends were too. Why was that ok? How could we really say we were dealing with or recovering from addiction when we were still actively addicted to a drug?

I also felt like I couldn’t really take credit for quitting drinking. The spiritual paradigm shift I experienced on mushrooms changed my mindset so much that, when I stopped drinking, it didn’t really feel like I was doing anything. It felt more like I was watching it happen; like it was just something to observe; like it was an inevitability. There was this one hellish trip in July of 2018 where the voice of the tryptamines was mocking me for my sense of agency. Laughing at me and my hubris for thinking that I had choices for how things could go for me after the awakening I’d had in March. 

There was also the post-enlightenment decision I’d made to discontinue taking SSRI medication I’d been taking for almost 9 years. It was a strange, risky choice. I felt like Lexapro was giving me an out from the real fallout of my alcohol addiction. The depression caused by my hangovers could only get so bad with them in place. By discontinuing them, I felt I could force my own hand. I’d be removing the buffer and have to take alcohols blows directly on the chin. And for a few months, I sure did. After getting off my meds, having a couple of beers would make me sad for 3 days. Tying one on would make me want to stay in bed for a week. And god forbid I used cocaine and alcohol...the suicidal ideation scared me so much I thought I might have to check myself into a hospital. It was clear, I no longer had the serotonin to spare on drinking. I just could not do it anymore. When I awoke in hell on New Year’s Day 2019, I told myself, “I’m not gonna do this for a while.”

After 9 months of abstaining from alcohol, I’m not sure why I was surprised that my relationship with cannabis changed too. In a moment of intense, psychological crisis in at the end of September, I reached out to an old therapist for guidance. I was experiencing many intense PTSD symptoms ranging from panic and depression to flashbacks and dissociative/depersonalization episodes. It was brutal. He suggested that I might want to try taking a break from all substances for a month or two to see if that helped. I gathered up all the grass in the apartment and smoked it all in a big, silly, last hurrah. It felt really stupid and empty.

Two weeks later, my symptoms all radically decreased in severity. Some of them disappeared entirely. I couldn’t believe it. I looked through some old emails from 2008 and 2009 that I’d exchanged with my therapist and remembered the conflicting feelings I’d had about smoking weed even back then. I wondered, “Did I EVER really like smoking pot or did I just want to like it this whole time?” Toward the end of November, when I decided to just take a single hit from my one-hitter to see what I thought about it after a two-month break, I had to admit I didn’t think much of it at all. Since then I’ve smoked weed 5 or 6 times and I haven’t enjoyed it all that  much. Music sounds great when I’m high but that’s about it. Otherwise it makes following the plot of a movie or the flow of a conversation annoyingly difficult now. I usually end up regretting having done it.

Why am I writing all this? I think I just needed to write this to give myself a little credit. I’d been treating these lifestyle changes like all the glory had to go to psychedelics. Psychedelics brought my mind to a place where I, at least for a moment, believed that I was actually a complete, valid, real person; one that didn’t need to feel ashamed to exist or work towards annihilating myself. The real work is in learning how to be that person and the practice.

On Returning; Assembling the Mosaic of DMT Experience

I haven’t posted in almost 6 months. As with most of my life's pursuits, I allowed my self-confidence to be undermined by a debasing, disordered, and cruelly critical inner monologue. It persists. Maybe in the future I'll find a more elegant solution but for now the only way I see forward is by brute force of will. I hope it gets easier.

When I started this blog, my intent was to document every psychedelic experience I’ve ever had, past and present. Maybe I bit off more than I could chew. More accurately, maybe I set a goal for myself that I knew I could not reach so that I would fail. My goal right now is just to publish this post. I don’t even care if my thoughts are incomplete or imperfect. They always are and I never let myself off the hook for it. It’s time to give myself a fucking break.

I want to throw out a smattering of thoughts as a sort of “state of the union” on my personal work with DMT. This substance has been a deep source of fascination and personal insight for me over the last year. I believe this might only be the beginning.

It’s been 10 months since I started experimenting with DMT. I’ve been pretty sloppy about keeping track of the number of experiences but I figure there have been about 30-35. Initially I was very enthusiastic (maybe too much so) and was doing it multiple times a week, sometimes 3 or 4 times in a sitting. At some point I felt like I’d gone too far too fast and I backed off for almost two months. Lately I’ve been visiting hyperspace every 2 to 5 weeks. 

The molecule calls to me. Not in the way an addictive drug calls out in that desperate, sickly way. It’s more strange and subtle than that. I might be out for a walk and I smell something that reminds me of DMT’s scent. Some people think it smells like moth balls. I think it smells like alien cologne. I might be meditating and something I saw on DMT floats through my consciousness. When I’m on other psychedelics, especially mushrooms, spirits from the DMT space call out to me like, “Come on, man! You know that THIS is where you really want to be!” Considering how many times I’ve asked myself “Am I dead?” while with the molecule, and considering my lifelong battle with depression and suicidal ideation, the yearning for DMT feels almost like “l’appel du vide,” the call of the void.

I’ve changed my route of administration a couple of times since starting out. My first time, I sandwiched the freebase crystals in dried mint leaves and smoked from a bong. It worked but I didn’t realize how inefficiently until an experienced friend showed me his glass “oil burner” bubbler (It’s a crack pipe). I bought myself one and found it to be much better when I could actually get the technique right. Still, it was tricky and hazardous. Employing butane torches while using a substance that takes your motor skills away became a frequent worry and resulted in some harrowing experiences. By investing 30 dollars in a highly recommended cannabis concentrate vaporizer, I found a consistent, reliable, safe, and sometimes frighteningly efficient delivery vehicle for the spice.

Early on, I got the feeling that there needed to be a ritual around these trips. I couldn’t look at them as “getting high” or anything like that. I started to see the experience as more like practicing magick, like a conjuring of alien spirits. The DMT entities (I can’t seriously call them “machine elves” and I’ve never seen a “jester”) seem as real to me as my cat. I started to feel like I needed to do something to let them know that I appreciated them visiting me. Still, I feel silly praying or making any kind of demonstration that’s too elaborate or hippieish. I’m still a punk rocker at heart and I fear going to far off the woo woo deep end. Most times, I sage smudge my apartment, strike a gong in every direction, and meditate before blasting off. It’s not much but it seems like enough for now.

DMT still scares the hell out of me. Actually, no. DMT doesn’t really scare me. Any time I’ve ever felt fear on DMT, it’s been momentary. THINKING ABOUT doing DMT scares the hell out of me. When I make up my mind to trip, I’m filled with an intense dread. The kind of dread that always accompanies the call of the void. Like when you’re looking at the ground below from the observation deck of a skyscraper. 

More accurately though, thinking about DMT scares me in the same way that thinking about falling in love scares me. The DMT experience brings with it many of the potential hazards of falling in love: vulnerability, the stirring up of memories, challenges to old senses of identity, fears of discovering more meaning out of one’s existence, fears of not being able to live up to the personal expectations of a life elevated by that meaning. Maybe people with a healthier concept of love than I possess don’t experience the same kind of fear I do around the experience.

I guess it makes sense. The feeling I experience on DMT, more than any other besides awe, is that of love. A full, freely accessible, universal love that is there for the taking and for the giving. A love that transcends all fear, all bias. A love that my interpersonal relationships are far less reliable at providing. A love I rarely feel safe about giving myself over to. Part of the emotional mosaic formed of these experiences seems to crystallize around teaching me the inexhaustible resource of love and the total silliness of mortal fear.

It might be important for me to talk about that mosaic of experience. The smoked DMT experience is one of such high-speed grandiose complexity and it gives one almost nothing to anchor themselves to. One cannot take in the totality of any single experience and make sense of it. The contact with entities that greet, that nurture, that share, that joke, that disappear. The torrential download information that seems to be the code explaining time, space, and all of existence. The rushes of light and color and shape forming rooms, tunnels, the gears of the universe. For 7 to 20 minutes I am locked in an unyielding astonishment that I wish I could detach myself from so that I can take it all in. And then, like a dream, it just fades away as regular consciousness returns and language starts doing its reductive job on trying to parse that space of ineffable enormity.

Being that it’s all so intense and fleeting, it seems to me that one can only make sense of the experience by forming a sort of mental mosaic of the totality of one’s numerous experiences. I could talk about countless instances that lasted mere fractions of seconds and had zero context of their own. However, over months and months of aggregating, of integrating, of meditating on these experiences, the fragmented elements start to form a kind of pixelated philosophical picture, an incomplete spiritual mapping, a developing cosmology.

One recurring theme in my experience is that of seeing yogi-like entities at the beginning of my trips. Every time I see them they express a pleasant surprise at my arrival, like, “Oh hey! You’re here!” These entities like to talk to me. Recently, at the outset of a trip that I felt particularly fearful going in to, one of them told me, “You’re not scared of ME. You’re scared of YOU!” In another recent experience, which I undertook after spending an hour trying to find a 10-strip of LSD tabs I’d misplaced in my room, the entity told me, “You know that thing you were looking for? It’s YOU!” Early in my experiences, yogic entities came and told me I needed to “relax” and “breathe” and that “if [I] treat this like meditation, [they] have things [they] can show me.” 

Recently, in a trip I went into after a particularly serene meditation session, a small, orange, glowing, sprite-like entity told me excitedly, ‘You’re starting to get it!” It then went on a hurried lecture about relaxing in to different levels of experience and what those levels might contain. Then, with a preface of “Also, while we’re at it...,” it initiated a massive, high-speed download of information which came out of its oversized, smiling mouth which seemed to contain everything I might ever need to know about everything in the observable and hidden universe.

I take much of the psychedelic experience like a little taste of meditation made perfect. My yogic DMT entities seem to reinforce that idea in a literal way. As I continue to work with this molecule, I can’t help but feel that DMT wants to teach me something. At least at this stage of the game, what it seems to want to teach me is HOW to use DMT; how to be present and fully appreciate the enormity of such a short, bewildering experience. Extrapolating those lessons out a level, it seems to me that what these experiences are trying to teach me is that the whole point of LIFE is to learn how to do it; to learn how to live every moment of this short, bewildering, enormous experience serenely, genuinely, appreciatively, consciously.

I’m going to try to stay more current with this blog in the coming months. If anyone is actually reading this, thank you.