I've long had an interest in psychedelic drugs. The idea of a substance that doesn't make you happy or sad, but just temporarily rearranges your thoughts and potentially gives you insight into yourself has long attracted me. It doesn't hurt that so much great music has been made on psychedelic drugs, acid being particularly prominent in that respect. Somehow, it doesn't even hurt that a couple of my favorite artists had mental breakdowns precipitated by taking (a lot of) acid.
Experienced people I've talked to have recommended climbing through the various psychedelic drugs according to strength. Start with pot, then mushrooms, then acid or more exotic psychedelics. I've smoked pot. I've ingested pot. I've ingested quite a bit of pot in one sitting, such that I was aware of how thin the line between vivid imagination and hallucination can be. It was somewhat later that I found a way to buy mushrooms. Access has always been the limiting factor in my aspirations to exploring the world of drugs. I suppose the advantage of having more brains than access is that by the time I've tried anything, I've researched it pretty thoroughly.
I planned on taking mushrooms with a friend. This friend was allergic to smoke and had yet to do anything psychedelic, so I planned on giving him a half dose. The eighth I had procured was supposed to be two doses, so I figured I could try half a dose while I was waiting for an opportunity to trip with him. I measured out roughly a quarter of the bag into a bowl and poured a can of chili over the mushrooms. I microwaved it warm, stirred, microwaved it until it was pretty hot, and ate.
I've heard that psilocybe mushrooms don't taste very good. I thought they were delicious. The chili may have helped. Considering that the psychoactive ingredient can be slowly cooked out and that raw, dry mushrooms probably never taste good, I thought the chili solution was at least as good as anything I'd heard of. The smaller bits were fully hydrated, though some of the bigger stems still had a certain cardboard texture.
I went to my room, plugged in my headphones and tried watching some porn. Nothing spectacular happened, but after ten or twenty minutes the video began to seethe with it's own life and hint at a colorfulness that I was pretty sure wasn't there. I got mentally sidetracked a lot. So while I won't rule out recreational mushroom use as a sex enhancer, it certainly won't be the first place I look, either.
After that, I got caught up looking at my computer's background picture. It was one taken by a friend that was dominated by coastal sage scrub and ocean, with a few people hiking down a trail. I began to pick out faces in the relative noise of the shrubs and sea. It was just like picking out faces from random patterns normally is, with their enigmatic features and static bizarreness, except that I kept seeing more and more faces. Pretty soon I could see faces over the entirety of my desktop background with the exception of the actual figures in the photo. After trying a couple more photos to similar but less spectacular results, I started making music up in my head.
The music was sparse, but it was as clever as I was and as real-sounding as actual sound. I rocked out to myself for awhile. I eventually decided I might as well listen to real music.
You might think that turning on music would be immediately gratifying, but the first few bands I played just grated on me. I ended up settling on The Holy Modal Rounders, part of a 60's genre known as "acid folk". Like you'd expect, the band sounds like an otherwise faithful old timey folk band on acid. This indeed sounded amazing. It had immediacy and dimension on the periphery of the realm of the imaginable. I laughed at the clever or bizarre twists the music took. I saw the music in colors, soft but vibrant. Oranges, fuchsias, peaches and acid greens shimmered across my mind's eye along with the music. I'd long ago buried my head into my pillow, the better to focus.
At some point (roughly after an hour, according to itunes) I decided to take off the headphones and just think about everything in my head. Geometry, patterns within nature and other mostly mathematical ideas passed through my head, still illustrated or wreathed in that soft-but-vibrant color palette. I must have spent a couple hours completely lost in thought, face down on my pillow and sprawled across the bed.
Eventually I got hungry. One thing I noticed quickly about mushrooms is that while they don't favor any particular emotion, they intensify everything. My hunger was a slightly terrifying looming thing that I realized I needed to appease if I wanted things to be ok. So I wandered to the kitchen and rummaged around the fridge. I pulled out some old hummus and stale corn tortillas. The hummus had sourness from active culture, but not much complexity of flavor. I made a game of eating it savagely and deliberately. Each rip of the tortilla and swoop into the hummus was a wild gesture of fearlessness and wantonness. That proceeded until I ran out of food. My hunger sated, I resumed puzzling thoughts into my pillow.
An hour or two later dusk was falling and I got up to walk around. I walked into the back yard and reveled at the warmth of the air and the beauty of everything around me. I could tell the effects were beginning to wear off. My roommate Greg came around from the side yard, bike in hand from whatever errands he'd been running since I'd finished the chili. I decided it was the perfect time to go for a bike ride as I was feeling more normal with each passing minute and the sky was beautiful. I rode out without much thought as to where I'd go. I caught sight of a distant thunderhead over the trees, lit up in brilliant colors by the setting sun. As I progressed I looked the other direction over a field at the mountains in silhouette. The clear sky had color stretched across it like a sheet.
I turned into a golf course and began to skate along the cart path around the holes. With its surreal grassy contours, the twilight and the random patches of reeds, bushes and trees sprinkled throughout it looked kind of like a moonscape. The sensation of speed is so much stronger when you're winding around a twisty path amidst things than on the shoulder of a linear highway. I spotted a bunch of burrowing owls, just perking up for the evening's hunt. I remembered then that there was a designated preserve for them along the edge of this golf course. I flushed a few from their burrows as I swished by. I rode around that twilit landscape for a long while, passing expansive, nestled ponds and looked into the houses that opened onto the course as people began to turn on their lights and cook dinner.
By the time I got home it was fully dark and I was fully sober, still giddy from the fantastic nature of my trip and bike ride. My respect for mushrooms had kicked up quite a few notches. Pot will forever be the most available and mild of psychedelic drugs, but I've long disliked the constant hilarity and false sense of comprehension associated with the drug. Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between how much pot you've taken and your level of paranoia and forgetfulness. Mushrooms didn't seem to favor any emotion, inspire false self-confidence or impair my memory. There were a few times during my trip where a sense of discomfort or paranoia popped up and seemed like it might overtake me, but with some firm self-direction they passed within a moment of their appearance.
I should note that this half-dose of mushrooms was of a similar intensity to the most intense experiences I've had on pot. Though the social and emotional peace that I enjoyed at the time I took mushrooms has passed and with it my desire to do mushrooms, I eagerly await the time when I return to a peaceful mental place so that I can finish off the eighth with my aforementioned friend.
Fantastic.
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