first shroom experience: existential nightmare to introspective Extacy
The very first time I had one of these experiences was when I was a senior in high school. I had had plenty of experiences with other substances and had always had a fascination with these ones and other psychedelics in particular, but had never tried them for no other reason than I just never got around to it. A lot of my friends were party boy/ wanna be banger types who were more interested in drinking and whore drama than deep intellectual introspection.
Unlike them I was more into that kind of hippie shit and on a crisp Thursday night I made the completely arbitrary decision to follow through with it. Little did I know it would have profound life changing effects.
I made this decision already pretty late into the night but I’ve always been a night owl and understood I’d be getting no sleep that night if I followed through with the plan. Looking back it’s hilarious to me that I chose to trip for the first time at night alone in my room at one in the morning, with my dad and and stepmom and siblings sleeping soundly in rooms next to me. Our walls were extremely thin too but I digress.
Set and setting. My life had had no significant conflict or major stressors leading up to this point and I actually was very happy at that time. I had been dating a girl who was sweet, caring and infatuated with me and I very much cared about her and had spent a lot of my days that month getting high and seeing her everyday after school. Not only this but I had my career path laid out ahead of me nicely for after graduation. Knowing these things gave me increased confidence in what I was about to do. It’s also important to note I’ve always been a down for anything person when it comes to new experiences, ones involving recreational usage in particular.
The setting was my warmly lit and obscenely messy room with my simple but comfortable bed facing my tv and PlayStation. I also had a poster of Pinhead from Clive Barkers Hellraiser staring directly down at my bed. I glanced at them sitting on the desk and then looked back at the poster and took it right off the wall. I can recall vividly saying “absolutely fucking not” to myself as I folded it away.
I was aware that it would hit harder since it was my first time. I was also still decently baked from hanging with my girl earlier that evening. They consisted of a good stem to cap ratio. The taste didn’t bother me much and I turned on my tv to watch a movie in the same way I usually do whenever I do stuff like this . Despite my experiences with other substances, many of them intense in themselves, I was still a little nervous. However that nervousness at the very start was more outweighed by the excitement that I was actually doing it finally. About time I thought.
About ten minutes passed and I was feeling the mild stomach cramps, something I knew was a common side effect. It’s about twenty minutes in and it’s at this point I realize that I’m anxious as hell. I try not to let this register and I try to lay down and relax. I made the fatal mistake of thinking that distracting myself (i.e, adding even more stimulation) is gonna help relieve the now concerning amount of anxiety im feeling.
Like an idiot I turn the lights up in my room and start up gta V story mode while listening to music. At this point I should have removed all of this and gone out to the backyard or something to ground myself and get some fresh air, a method I use now when I’m having a bad trip. However at the time my brain was still reasoning from a ganja point of view rather than a mind altering one.
It’s about forty minutes in and I’m starting to believe this was a very very bad idea. This is around when the mind loops began and I gave up on the tv all together. I curled up and quite literally began to tweak out on my bed for a solid half an hour ish. My sense of time trying to recall this come up from hell is very warped but it felt like an eternity on that bed. The body high was there, feeling like a few shots of tequila, but the sheer amount of mind looping going on in my head completely outweighed any chances of me being able to enjoy it. I was mumbling in slurred words and felt genuinely schizophrenic, in an existential nightmare with no shape, form or way of escaping. It felt like greening out on strong edibles while my vision went all fried. I couldn’t sit still and i realize now if I had just shut off all the stimuli in my room I would’ve been handling it much better. I was visibly shaking on my bed wrapped up in a blanket.
It’s hard to put into words but all the pain I’d experienced as a kid and frustration that defined my early teen years was somehow manifesting simultaneously and running laps around my brain like a group of rabid dogs on crystal meth.
I experienced no visuals other than a deep orange tint to everything, which in the moment was menacing and violent, with my brain somehow relating it to napalm or the gas they used during World War One. Like an idiot through all this I was still playing very overstimulating music thinking it was going to calm me down. I simply did not have the brain capacity to think to even turn it off.
After what felt like an eternity of coming up I finally came down and gathered my senses a little. I had the clarity to understand that my room was not the place to be in and wrapping myself in my blanket I very cautiously opened my door and tiptoed drunkenly into the dimly lit living room, absolutely dazed, the walls moving and shifting with patterns of lizards.
The change of scenery was exactly what I needed, so I thought. In reality my psychedelic virgin of a brain was probably thanking me for taking the lighting down a notch and turning off all stimulation, other than the music. My mind now was in battle mode, and I had started to figure out a system of coping with the anxiety by lying unmoving in the dark living room on the couch. I had started to control my breathing now and I put on the happiest music I knew, Masayoshi Takanaka.
The easygoing surf guitar riffs weren’t even soothing at this point in my mind, there were there for the sole purpose of fending off the insanely overstimulating and horrifically bad vibes that had been going down in my room. I laid on the couch and saw one of my sister’s Siamese kittens walking by. Seeing the cat helped me calm down for some reason and to this day I think animals are some of the best sitters you can have.
By now it was three am. I had gotten used to coming up and down a little now and through trial and error at the cost of what felt like my sanity I learned what to do and what not to do to trigger the anxiety. By now I was just waiting for the sunrise and the sweet relief that it represented to me. I got myself some water and I grabbed a candle (VERY important to me at the time) and stumbled back to my room to lay there.
I was still on edge just a little, but by now I had learned to cut out all the unnecessary stimuli. I layed gingerly in my bed with the candle lit and the Takanaka playing in my AirPods for about another half hour. I had gotten to the point where I had befriended my keys and began talking to them because I lacked a proper sitter.
By now I had achieved a sort of mental clarity regarding what I had eaten, which looking back was myself figuring out the looping thoughts that occur, the come ups and come downs, the importance of subconscious inputs into the brain. And it was right at the peak when i realized all this. I realized it was truly not to be messed with, not something you do for fun on a random school night, not for partying whatsoever.
I had been humbled by it, but also it had shown me how strong of a person I was mentally. I had hit rock bottom, tweaking out on my bed with all my past problems and insecurities sprinting through my head all at once. I had sought a way to escape that version of me, symbolized by me getting fed up with it all and moving to the living room to lay on the couch.
The couch was where i took all that shit in my head and faced it, worked it out, figured it out all on my own. No other humans to assist me, just me going up to the darkest depths of my mind, knocking at the doors and having to murder the demons that lived there one by one with my bare hands. And now, lying in my bed that had once been a place of horror and confusion, with the candle burning beside me, I realized I was mentally capable of anything after pulling through that horrible come up.
Instantly a wave of peace and serenity washed over me like I’ve never felt in my life. Clarity like I’ve never felt in my life. Relief…. Oh thank god sweet relief like I’ve never felt in my life. I layed in my bed and laughed out loud at all the evil that thought it could bully me and crush my psyche. I was capable of anything after pulling through that I thought. And now after all that came the reward, rest, and most importantly peace and serenity through the rest of the experience .
I was so confident in my capabilities and in myself as a person I had more. Most people would probably not recommend this especially after the hellish come up I had experienced. But the mental breakthrough I had laying in my bed there was so beautiful I was ecstatic to finish them. After I climbed into my bed in my candle lit room and layed there filled with joy and ecstasy. In my head had the strength and the ability and charisma to do anything.
While this was going on I started to come up again. Only this time my mind was clear and focused with an amazing, borderline orgasmic body sensation. Above my head was a circle in the ceiling where a light fixture was meant to be, but instead it was a biblically accurate angel with eyes all around, blinking at me curiously in a comforting way. I didn’t feel a shred of fear or anxiety, and from that point on I had very vivid hallucinations on the walls and floors and enjoyed every second of it.
Until about five AM I enjoyed the comedown while happily geeking out on the fresh wave of visuals I was getting. I danced in my room like an idiot to Led Zeppelin and some other bands i thought were fitting for the vibe. They made me have to shit at one point and my bathroom became the room where the walls and floors were covered in pulsating entities like the cover of a Tool album. Another recurring pattern was little colorful outlines of lizards on the walls.
I was happy but restless, experiencing that motivation to go out into the world and do literally anything. It was the wee hours of the morning and I lived at that time about a mile from the beach. I love the ocean so much so that was where i decided to go. I got dressed and remembered thinking how stupid it was I wore the same style everyday, how narrow minded that was somehow.
I also took my socks off and put them back on again probably five times, each time thinking they had holes in them . Finally I was ready and I quietly left the house and started walking down to the beach. I was still tripping balls, which I honestly just attribute to it being my first experience . It was still foggy and dark outside but peaceful, and when I looked up at the dark sky those Tool looking dudes would look down at me, gargantuan now that they had a bigger canvas to use than my bathroom walls.
It was a nice walk and I definitely looked like a mentally ill person laughing out loud as I walked down the street, laughing at how utterly stupid it was that people were about to go to work to go do things they hate for paper rectangles that the government makes. Food and shelter and water are given to us by the earth why would you need a job. It all sounded like illogical nonsense as I traversed the surreal streets.
But anyway I eventually made it to the beach and giddily stumbled down to a nice isolated spot by some sand dunes. Screw a chair I thought as I layed in the sand up against a dune. I remember being very intentional with the dune I chose to lay up against, making sure it was a “good one” and not a bad one whatever that means. I found a flashlight on the beach someone had left there and my mind connected it to the candle from earlier. It was important to me so I took it. I still have that flashlight.
It was cold out but even still I took my shirt off and the sand felt amazing against my skin. I lied there in that spot watching the gigantic Tool dudes pulsate in the sky above me and admired the shimmering beauty of the waves. Totally at peace. At this point it was dawn and the sun came up while I was coming up as well. The colors shimmered more than ever and the Tool entities bid their farewell to me telepathically, leaving me with the reminder of how strong I was and that I can handle anything. It was truly a beautiful culmination of the emotional and mental roller coaster I had had been on.
I took a good look at the ocean one last time and headed back to my house, feeling like I was radiating positive energy. I talked with a lady who was out walking her dog and a dude who was eating breakfast in a parking lot. When I looked a person on that walk home I thought about all I’d been through and how crazy it was that every person I saw had the potential to do the same if they sought it out. The world was beautiful and if in that moment you told me that all my possessions had burned in a fire while I was at the beach I genuinely wouldn’t have given a flying fuck.
I arrived home to find all my family still sleeping peacefully, completely unaware of the introspective Odessy I had just completed. I sat on my Bed listening to the birds chirping outside my window. It was time to rest now, school could go to hell (or probably nirvana would have made more sense in that moment ). I had just learned more than fourth period could ever teach me. But I was tired and I drifted into the most peaceful sleep I’ve ever had in my life.
A few hours later my I woke up to a call from my dad asking why I wasn’t at school. I told him I was constipated ( which I was a little from all I had eaten the previous night and i was probably dehydrated as well), and he believed me and said he’d tell the office to excuse my absence from first and second period. I was still a little out of it but I had a strong motivation to socialize so I showered and got dressed and walked a few blocks over to my school.
The rest of the day was a bit surreal which was something I was expecting. An interesting note is that I love metal music and back then I was really into black/death metal. However I didn’t listen to any metal for about a week after. It sounded to noisy, to hateful which was weird to me at the time because I normally wouldn’t have cared about that. I think the experience was therapeutic and forced me mentally let go of a lot of subconscious angst and violence.
Overall the experience showed me that I’m a strong person mentally, and that others opinions never mean jack shit if you do the right thing and live a happy life doing what you want. I believe it acted as therapy to issues I wasn’t even aware I had, and after it was all over my self confidence, self esteem and charismatic qualities are higher and I appreciate my potential more than I thought was ever possible.