I just came home from an astounding trip. The following trip report is composed at home from my memory and the notes that I wrote while high. Again, remember these important rules if you’re thinking about trying out psychedelic drugs.
Substances:
Fresh Cambodian Psilocybe Cubensis (55-60 grams)
Cannabis sativa (Approx 3 good hits, no tobacco mixed in)
Setting:
Outdoors, social.
Me and three friends started out after lunch yesterday. The plan was to go camping by a remote lake, sleep in a tent and enjoy the forest while high. By the time we got to the designated camping spot, it was 1630. We decided how much we wanted to take after we stopped the car. I ate 45 grams then and 15 grams half an hour later.
The onset was quick, almost like mushroom tea. One friend reported some nausea, but I felt almost none. I also didn’t experience the familiar muscle tension I usually get in my lower back and face during the onset. The same friend who felt a bit nauseous also had the strongest effects, it hit him hard long before it hit me, even though we weigh the same, ate the same amount of mushrooms, and we had eaten lunch together so his stomach was not emptier than mine.
1730: As the effects began to make themselves known for real, we decided to go explore our surroundings before sunset. Our base camp was high on a forested cliff above the lake, and we climbed down the side of the mountain. After climbing down the cliff side, I discovered two of my friends excitedly staring down a tree. They had found a lump on the tree trunk that looked like it was alive. I tried it, and sure enough, after putting my face close enough to the tree I could see all kinds of shapes where the eyes would normally have been struggling to keep focus. My visual acuity was unusually strong, but everything seemed to be moving or crawling in an exciting way in the periphery. As we made our way to the waterfront, I interpreted falling leaves as giant butterflies. I found the environment strikingly beautiful. Colours started to shift and swirl when I relaxed, and I had to stop to take it in fully. One friend accurately described the effect of floating colours in the reflection on the water as similar to a Monet painting. Our moods were good, and we sat down on a log under a large oak to admire the sunset.
After a bit of relaxation, the conversation turned to jokes, and I think we all felt very confident and relaxed, because we all laughed more than ever before. It might have been the mushrooms, but I was impressed by the cleverness and delivery from two of my friends. The visual effects became less intense, and we decided to make our way back to camp for some cannabis. We found a way up the other side of the mountain, and prepared the stuff. It was getting dark now, and the wind was getting stronger. It was difficult to get a good hit because the wind kept killing the lighter, so we made a fire and started to cook. After eating (delicious soup filled with meat from lunch), me and one friend took another trip into the forest. It was very dark now, and all we brought for a light source was a camera. This was on purpose. The idea was to use the camera flash to get an image of the surroundings, and then try to navigate by that memory for the next ten seconds or so. It was pretty fun, but we soon realized the visual experience of the camera flash was way more exciting than the navigation part, so we stopped and just flashed the camera while we chatted for a bit.
By now, optical effects were beginning to become strongly distorted by the mushroom. The light from the camera flash seemed to stay on my retina for at least 30 seconds after each shot. I closed my eyes, and found that my visual imagination had grown far more potent than while sober. On our way back to camp, we stopped on a rock and looked up at the stars. We were both seeing little momentary sparks of light around each one, and I began to see a shimmer of rainbow colours across the whole sky. The moon was up now, and shining very brightly. Several times, the moonlight was so strong in my periphery that I thought someone was pointing a silver flashlight at my head.
As I focused on the shimmer, it started to take shape. Rather than a general fog of colours across the clear sky, it ordered itself into an ornamental tunnel of rainbow light, which seemed to flow from whatever light source I was focusing on directly down to me. It was very beautiful.
Back at base camp, the rest of the guys started talking about more exploration, while I laid down a bit away to enjoy the visual effects. The physical effect was also very comfortable at this time, even though I was lying on a fairly cold rock without any moss on it.
Looking up at the stars, they seemed to shift and move about a little bit, or perhaps I could see the movement in the air between me and the stars. Either way, they appeared very much like three-dimensional objects, hovering at different distances away from me. I normally think of them simply as two-dimensional dots in a flat sky. It was an exciting sensation.
I closed my eyes, and the inside of my eyelids looked just as bright as the moonlit sky. Immediately, the closed-eye visuals began. At first they were just dancing lights, but I willed them into becoming fantastic temples and beautiful vistas with trees and lakes. Details like fog, reflections or billowing air appeared seemingly on their own, without me trying to create them. I called my friends over, and two of them laid down beside me to see if they could get the same effect.
This time when I closed my eyes, I let the experience decide what to show. All I focused on was demanding that it looked real. Whenever a vision looked too pastel or too flat, I willed it into becoming three-dimensional, shaded and textured. I was nearing the peak of the trip, and it could feel it was going to be something spectacular. To my great surprise, I was visited by the little green men.
I had never seen them before, but I recognized them the moment I saw them, from Terence McKenna’s descriptions. At first there was only one, but they rapidly multiplied as if by mitosis until I was looking out across a sea of them. They appeared similar to a drawing of a funky alien I made long before I tried drugs.
They seemed entirely three-dimensional and real to me. The colour of their skin was difficult to determine, as they seemed to be emitting their own light, which shifted and shimmered. They transmitted a feeling of excitement and welcoming, and I got the impression that they were entirely benevolent. They struck me as having a child-like curiosity, but also great wisdom and patience. All of their eyes were looking at me with a sort of expectant expression, and I saw something like a small wall in front of them all. I got the feeling they didn’t want to impose unless I asked them to. Remembering something Terence once said, I mentally repeated the phrase “Come in, little green men”.
Given the green light, they merrily started jumping over the fence and began communicating with me by doing tricks. They transformed themselves into obvious mirages that faded on my retina, they danced about and changed the landscape around them. I can’t remember everything they did, because I was trying hard not to become too excited or impressed. I had the feeling that if I were to gave in to my astonishment, I would miss the point of what they were trying to tell me. I had the feeling that I was very close to a major insight, and my mind was straining to understand the message. My powers of imagination felt so strong that I could change perspectives as easy as reaching into my pocket. I could imagine being a cow, or living on an alien planet with vivid a sensation of realism. I almost became convinced that I could leave this world if I wanted, and live the rest of my life as any kind of creature I felt like being.
At this point one of my friends started laughing at his CEVs, and a discussion started. This broke my ability to focus. The green men disappeared, and we lay there describing our visions to each other for a while. My friends described jumping up and down on a giant broccoli, and similar things. Still reeling from my experience, I attempted to describe the feeling of being able to change into any being in any place I wanted, and at least one of them became convinced it was possible.
The other one, who had been running along the stem of an enormous broccoli a second ago, felt convinced that the world in his head was so real it must be the same as the real world – ergo, he would be able to navigate his way to the tent with his eyes closed. This proved untrue, but he said it was an extremely amusing sensation to be looking at something so realistic and convincing while receiving reports of a very different world from his feet.
My friends started to feel a bit cold laying there on the bare rock, so they got up and started to put fuel on the fire. Their conversation made it impossible for me to relax completely and let the visions come back, so I eventually got up as well.
The open-eye hallucinations continued for most of the night, but after what I had seen with my eyes closed, they didn’t seem very exciting anymore. The excitement had faded a bit, and I became somewhat reserved because I was annoyed with my friends for bickering over how to handle the fire. After some more soup, three of us started to feel tired and decided to retire to the tent. It was only 22, but it was dark and it had been a day of feverish mental activity.
Slight optical effects like flashes of light in different colours went on for most of the night, making it difficult to sleep. This was the first time I experienced something I would characterize as negative while coming down from mushrooms. There was a slight headache, but I attribute that to the fact that I have a cold, because I’ve never felt it before on either of these compounds. The comedown was longer than I expected, probably because of the large dose.
I won’t discuss what I learned from my trip in this post, because I feel like I have a lot of thinking to do. It will probably be a while before I digest this experience entirely. I’m looking forward to the challenge, but even if not much useful comes out of it, at least we all had a fantastic weekend. Hope yours was as good as mine.
