Ill preface this by saying I wrote this report the day after I had this experience, so pardon if the writing seems a little bit frantic. This is quite personal, and Id never thought I could have these type of effects from what I considered to be not the highest dose in the world. I have experience taking LSD at music festivals, candyflipping, so I thought I could handle psychadelics. I guess this one was Karma. either way I'm happy to have experienced this, so I figured ill share what I was able to articulate this trip which was far more "all encompassing" than visual
4g penis envy
- felt like a low dose, but given the environment it crashed
I'd taken this dose of shrooms before a week or two prior, and had a great time, with pretty good clarity of thought and not a lot of emotional swing. Although that time I took it as tea with a friend
Took around 12:30am assumed that my friends would arrive at the bar in 15, and we'd leave to the venue. We were planning on going to a UK garage show at a low key venue. They were an hour late to the bar, by 1:30 the dose began to come on strong. Lots of heavy drinking and alcohol by those around me, and by my friends when they got there late. One guy did 12 shots back to back chasing with orange juice. Visuals were starting to come on and my anxiety was increasing. As I left the bar the floor was moving a lot and at this point I had a gut feeling I needed to get home.
No Ubers would come, so I found a taxi driver, he said he'd take me home for 25 dollars and he let me get in the front seat so I wouldn't get motion sick. I told him my address and he knew where to go, bless that man. I found it hard to talk so I told him I was feeling sick and put in my headphones to help calm me down. I was playing some jonn serrie planetarium music. I felt like I was seeing many memories and having flashbacks to every time I'd ever been as we were driving down west 16th. I didn't have any perception of how long the car ride took or how fast he was driving. To me it felt like the taxi driver saved my life.
I get home and stumble upstairs, my balance isn't very good and my sense of space is very distorted. At this point I'm anxious but still believe I can hold on and just ride the trip out as normal. I set up some colored lights in my room and play blonde by Frank ocean. The tension and release of the songs feel powerful, and even with music I'm having a hard time judging time. 2 tracks in I go to the bathroom, I'm not wearing pants or shoes because I was warm, but I'd never leave the room without slides, the floors are gross, obviously my judgement is impaired. Looking into the mirror I hardly recognize myself, my face is moving a lot, my eyes are expanding, I feel stuck and I feel myself stumble onto the floor. I get up and go back to my room.
As I lay down onto my bed I become aware that I'm not alright. I sent texts to my friends telling them to not check on me when I get home, because I know human interaction would make me freak my shit. I also don't want to be judged. I've always been interested in what psycahdelics do to the mind, so as I was beginning to think "is this ego death" as I didn't recognize myself, I felt comfortable knowing that I could make it through it all. I keep listening to the music, and my bedsheets begin look like sand, and my body is part of it. Get up and stretch around my room, i move around feeling incredibly strange, shifting and shifting, I think I probably was naked at this point too. I drink some water and lie back down, and at this point I had the impulse to go under my blanket.
Going under made me stop really seeing. A lot of this memory is pretty fuzzy, I started to feel like I was melting, that I was the sheets. I felt like I was forgetting how I should do anything, how to move my arms, how to speak, definitely made some weird noises. At this point one of my favorite songs, self control came on, and that prompted me to go onto my back. I don't know what exactly I felt but this was the point where I knew, that I was slipping, I was losing my sense of self, and I was okay with that. I started to cry for a bit- I hadn't cried since probably the eighth grade.
I don't remember exactly how I got to this point, but I turned the music off, I think my speakers were buzzing and it made me uncomfortable. At this point I was acting purely out of impulse, my brain would tell me I should keep listening. As I turned the speaker off I fell on the floor again, and when I opened my eyes I saw my coffee table book - titled "beer". Alcohol and my relationship had triggered this episode j think, and I couldn't bear to look at it or any of the beer cans in my room from our pregame. I did this and stumbled back to bed, now in silence. At this point I felt my mind stating to race, feeling the impulses, rolling around. Not having control of my body. I stopped being able to see and impulsively went to the corner of my bed. Lying on my front. I was trying to be comfortable, I felt the pain in my shoulder which had been aching the week prior. I was breaking down into my most fundamental feelings. Comfort, pain, following the animalistic tendancy. I had no control over my thoughts. I felt the need for self preservation, but at some point there stopped being a self to preserve. I was thinking about me and what I was feeling, but I kept thinking "who is thinking" as I had no control. I began to think about who I was, looking around my room, but the feeling was that I could only define myself within the context of other things. I saw my skateboards having from my wall, my skis, as things that defined me and who I was, but I was confused that I had to be defined by external means.
I started to think about my relationships with others, how they would see me, but the feeling was that I only was who I am because of my interactions with others; the sense was that external stimuli defined me. I saw myself as only a product of external factors, as having no free will, as a feeling of just chemical impulse that drives the human experience. At this point I was not seeing, it felt like I was perceiving touch and sight completely raw, without an identity to process them through - as if I was tasting something I'd never tasted before- nothing could be described. Pure human sensation. I've been reading Schopenhauer lately, and he talks about how as humans we process sensation through our intuition, except there was no "me" to interpret anything. Everything felt recursive, without a mind to attach my perceptions to, I could not define myself- saying my name out loud felt wrong, unrecognizable. I thought "that name cannot be me, because someone else has given it to me". I felt constantly defined by other things, and that without them there was nothing.
At this point I was spiraling, "who am I? How can I define myself" was the key question. I felt that what I study and love, history and photography, is based on just capturing the past and recording it, but not making an impact of my own, I felt lik an observer, like if I didn't exist in the world it would go so easily. At this point I pretty much felt like I didn't exist in the world, I couldn't see my body or feel myself. I had no understanding of the form of my myself, I just felt like raw perception and causality in motion. That my life was meaningless. At this point I had a strange crisis, where I felt "if my life is defined by nothing, I could take my own life and be okay with that right now" but also as "I am nothing so there is no life to take". I was paralyzed, I physically couldn't move at this point.
Here I swapped from thinking about myself to my relationships with others, as being defined only by what others think of me. I thought of my closest friends, my family, my girlfriend, and the common link I found was only being able to feel connected to people I truly loved. Some of them my actual family, some friends that I truly love like brothers, and of course my girlfriend who I love romantically. This part gets a little strange. I was defining myself by my capacity to love. My thoughts kept saying " I am love, I am love, I am love" over and over and over. My mind had broken down everything except love, there was no lust or physical love at all, it was "pansexuality" in the truest sense. My mind had no physical barriers between loving men or woman. here I wasn't "physically" or "romantically" attracted to anything but emotionally I loved all. I truly believe I felt love in its purest form right there. I was love. My life boiled down to do I or do I not love, a yes or a no, a 1 or 0, things started to feel binary, black and white, absolute. This brought me back to the feelings of causality, that everything in every life has just been a domino effect from the chaos of the universe. Back into nothing. I was spiraling again, I kept thinking how can I be love if there is no me to love anything at all, I felt like a hole, a gap in the world. I was lying in an empty bed that didn't even have me in it.
I didn't know how much time had pased but the sun was starting to come up. I had called my friend (lets call him Alex), who id done that earlier dose with to tell him a little of how I was feeling. When he got home around 3 he asked to come talk to me, and I felt comfortable around him in a sense of being on psycahdelics I was cool with that. I put some clothes on and he talked me through how I was feeling - the next day he told me I was making zero sense at all, because at this point I was still tripping. At this point the effects were lighter, being with someone else meant I had to put my face back on, be me again, even if I didn't know who I was I had to at least pretend I did, because that's the person he knew. It definitely helped me, as it was a reminder that others do percieve me as a unique individual, not just chemical impulse and raw instinct. We chatted for what he told me was about half and hour and then he went to sleep.
After he left I lay back down and thought I would be alright, I stated playing some music again. I began to slip back down again, but the feeling was strange . I had no perception of time still, and as I heard others come back into the house at around 4;30 from the bar (I later learned) I wanted to get up and go see them, but I couldn't, I couldn't move, couldn't speak, because my head slipped back down into that feeling of raw being. Of being no me. It's difficult to explain the slope of how I got back down into that state of being, but after Alex left it was the questioning myself again and again on who I was and what I was doing. I remember feeling that after this Id never be the same, I couldn't be the same, as I wasn't me anymore. The feeling of no free will came back, I couldn't move to get up, I felt there was no point, as if everything was a domino chain reaction, what was the point of anything at all. At this point I was convinced I'd never move for the rest of my life, someone might find me here but it would be too late. I wanted to scream for help but I couldn't move my mouth, I felt paralyzed in every sense of the word. If this part taught me anything is that your environment can do so much to you, I probably shouldn't have been alone at this time, but that's just how it ended up. I ended up paralyzed feeling like my life did not matter, everyone would come home, do as they did, and my presence would make no difference. I am not depressed, and I know my friends care for me, but my feeling here was deep set emotional issues with my character. I felt like I was a side character, like my life was never to be "great". As a historian, an academic, a photographer, I was sidelined to recording, obsessing over memory and knowledge, but never blazing trail ahead into the unknown like the heroes of old. I felt this is why I tend to be uncompetitive, why I don't talk shit when I play games, why I don't fight, why I tend to be a patient person, that I'm complacent, and accept my place on the sidelines of the world. I felt like in every room I've ever been in I was part of someone else's story, never making my own. I think this was due to the residual loss of identity I had from earlier, I was still not feeling like myself, but at least I could think about "myself" without collapsing back into that feeling of only being animal impulses. I wanted so badly for someone to come into my room and find me, for someone to help me back out, I felt so so weak, probably the lowest I've ever felt in my entire life. I could have held my breath and just stopped breathing then and there, as I was so convinced that I was burdrned with this curse of failing to be anyone, that trying to be anyone was worthless. If there is a god out there, I called for him to help me, to tell me that I could be someone, to tell me it was going to be okay. Nobody answered.
At this point I'm not sure how long I lay there, but I genuinely had zero thoughts. Nothing. I heard people coming home and talking through the walls but I couldn't begin to imagine being part of the conversation. I'd turned my speakers off too when Alex left earlier, I think I was trying to sleep. At some point I was able to move my legs Again and as the effects were wearing off, I was able to get out of bed. The visuals were far less intense now, just textures flowing, my sense of balance being off, but no vivid geometry anymore. I walked through the hallways, barefoot again, and found some friends to chat to and at this point, although a little spaced out and shaken, I felt like me again. They told me about what happened on that night out, and it seemed like there was just something in the water that day. Everyone had a story, and even though we were all fucked up and hungover, it felt good to be a person again
4g penis envy
- felt like a low dose, but given the environment it crashed
I'd taken this dose of shrooms before a week or two prior, and had a great time, with pretty good clarity of thought and not a lot of emotional swing. Although that time I took it as tea with a friend
Took around 12:30am assumed that my friends would arrive at the bar in 15, and we'd leave to the venue. We were planning on going to a UK garage show at a low key venue. They were an hour late to the bar, by 1:30 the dose began to come on strong. Lots of heavy drinking and alcohol by those around me, and by my friends when they got there late. One guy did 12 shots back to back chasing with orange juice. Visuals were starting to come on and my anxiety was increasing. As I left the bar the floor was moving a lot and at this point I had a gut feeling I needed to get home.
No Ubers would come, so I found a taxi driver, he said he'd take me home for 25 dollars and he let me get in the front seat so I wouldn't get motion sick. I told him my address and he knew where to go, bless that man. I found it hard to talk so I told him I was feeling sick and put in my headphones to help calm me down. I was playing some jonn serrie planetarium music. I felt like I was seeing many memories and having flashbacks to every time I'd ever been as we were driving down west 16th. I didn't have any perception of how long the car ride took or how fast he was driving. To me it felt like the taxi driver saved my life.
I get home and stumble upstairs, my balance isn't very good and my sense of space is very distorted. At this point I'm anxious but still believe I can hold on and just ride the trip out as normal. I set up some colored lights in my room and play blonde by Frank ocean. The tension and release of the songs feel powerful, and even with music I'm having a hard time judging time. 2 tracks in I go to the bathroom, I'm not wearing pants or shoes because I was warm, but I'd never leave the room without slides, the floors are gross, obviously my judgement is impaired. Looking into the mirror I hardly recognize myself, my face is moving a lot, my eyes are expanding, I feel stuck and I feel myself stumble onto the floor. I get up and go back to my room.
As I lay down onto my bed I become aware that I'm not alright. I sent texts to my friends telling them to not check on me when I get home, because I know human interaction would make me freak my shit. I also don't want to be judged. I've always been interested in what psycahdelics do to the mind, so as I was beginning to think "is this ego death" as I didn't recognize myself, I felt comfortable knowing that I could make it through it all. I keep listening to the music, and my bedsheets begin look like sand, and my body is part of it. Get up and stretch around my room, i move around feeling incredibly strange, shifting and shifting, I think I probably was naked at this point too. I drink some water and lie back down, and at this point I had the impulse to go under my blanket.
Going under made me stop really seeing. A lot of this memory is pretty fuzzy, I started to feel like I was melting, that I was the sheets. I felt like I was forgetting how I should do anything, how to move my arms, how to speak, definitely made some weird noises. At this point one of my favorite songs, self control came on, and that prompted me to go onto my back. I don't know what exactly I felt but this was the point where I knew, that I was slipping, I was losing my sense of self, and I was okay with that. I started to cry for a bit- I hadn't cried since probably the eighth grade.
I don't remember exactly how I got to this point, but I turned the music off, I think my speakers were buzzing and it made me uncomfortable. At this point I was acting purely out of impulse, my brain would tell me I should keep listening. As I turned the speaker off I fell on the floor again, and when I opened my eyes I saw my coffee table book - titled "beer". Alcohol and my relationship had triggered this episode j think, and I couldn't bear to look at it or any of the beer cans in my room from our pregame. I did this and stumbled back to bed, now in silence. At this point I felt my mind stating to race, feeling the impulses, rolling around. Not having control of my body. I stopped being able to see and impulsively went to the corner of my bed. Lying on my front. I was trying to be comfortable, I felt the pain in my shoulder which had been aching the week prior. I was breaking down into my most fundamental feelings. Comfort, pain, following the animalistic tendancy. I had no control over my thoughts. I felt the need for self preservation, but at some point there stopped being a self to preserve. I was thinking about me and what I was feeling, but I kept thinking "who is thinking" as I had no control. I began to think about who I was, looking around my room, but the feeling was that I could only define myself within the context of other things. I saw my skateboards having from my wall, my skis, as things that defined me and who I was, but I was confused that I had to be defined by external means.
I started to think about my relationships with others, how they would see me, but the feeling was that I only was who I am because of my interactions with others; the sense was that external stimuli defined me. I saw myself as only a product of external factors, as having no free will, as a feeling of just chemical impulse that drives the human experience. At this point I was not seeing, it felt like I was perceiving touch and sight completely raw, without an identity to process them through - as if I was tasting something I'd never tasted before- nothing could be described. Pure human sensation. I've been reading Schopenhauer lately, and he talks about how as humans we process sensation through our intuition, except there was no "me" to interpret anything. Everything felt recursive, without a mind to attach my perceptions to, I could not define myself- saying my name out loud felt wrong, unrecognizable. I thought "that name cannot be me, because someone else has given it to me". I felt constantly defined by other things, and that without them there was nothing.
At this point I was spiraling, "who am I? How can I define myself" was the key question. I felt that what I study and love, history and photography, is based on just capturing the past and recording it, but not making an impact of my own, I felt lik an observer, like if I didn't exist in the world it would go so easily. At this point I pretty much felt like I didn't exist in the world, I couldn't see my body or feel myself. I had no understanding of the form of my myself, I just felt like raw perception and causality in motion. That my life was meaningless. At this point I had a strange crisis, where I felt "if my life is defined by nothing, I could take my own life and be okay with that right now" but also as "I am nothing so there is no life to take". I was paralyzed, I physically couldn't move at this point.
Here I swapped from thinking about myself to my relationships with others, as being defined only by what others think of me. I thought of my closest friends, my family, my girlfriend, and the common link I found was only being able to feel connected to people I truly loved. Some of them my actual family, some friends that I truly love like brothers, and of course my girlfriend who I love romantically. This part gets a little strange. I was defining myself by my capacity to love. My thoughts kept saying " I am love, I am love, I am love" over and over and over. My mind had broken down everything except love, there was no lust or physical love at all, it was "pansexuality" in the truest sense. My mind had no physical barriers between loving men or woman. here I wasn't "physically" or "romantically" attracted to anything but emotionally I loved all. I truly believe I felt love in its purest form right there. I was love. My life boiled down to do I or do I not love, a yes or a no, a 1 or 0, things started to feel binary, black and white, absolute. This brought me back to the feelings of causality, that everything in every life has just been a domino effect from the chaos of the universe. Back into nothing. I was spiraling again, I kept thinking how can I be love if there is no me to love anything at all, I felt like a hole, a gap in the world. I was lying in an empty bed that didn't even have me in it.
I didn't know how much time had pased but the sun was starting to come up. I had called my friend (lets call him Alex), who id done that earlier dose with to tell him a little of how I was feeling. When he got home around 3 he asked to come talk to me, and I felt comfortable around him in a sense of being on psycahdelics I was cool with that. I put some clothes on and he talked me through how I was feeling - the next day he told me I was making zero sense at all, because at this point I was still tripping. At this point the effects were lighter, being with someone else meant I had to put my face back on, be me again, even if I didn't know who I was I had to at least pretend I did, because that's the person he knew. It definitely helped me, as it was a reminder that others do percieve me as a unique individual, not just chemical impulse and raw instinct. We chatted for what he told me was about half and hour and then he went to sleep.
After he left I lay back down and thought I would be alright, I stated playing some music again. I began to slip back down again, but the feeling was strange . I had no perception of time still, and as I heard others come back into the house at around 4;30 from the bar (I later learned) I wanted to get up and go see them, but I couldn't, I couldn't move, couldn't speak, because my head slipped back down into that feeling of raw being. Of being no me. It's difficult to explain the slope of how I got back down into that state of being, but after Alex left it was the questioning myself again and again on who I was and what I was doing. I remember feeling that after this Id never be the same, I couldn't be the same, as I wasn't me anymore. The feeling of no free will came back, I couldn't move to get up, I felt there was no point, as if everything was a domino chain reaction, what was the point of anything at all. At this point I was convinced I'd never move for the rest of my life, someone might find me here but it would be too late. I wanted to scream for help but I couldn't move my mouth, I felt paralyzed in every sense of the word. If this part taught me anything is that your environment can do so much to you, I probably shouldn't have been alone at this time, but that's just how it ended up. I ended up paralyzed feeling like my life did not matter, everyone would come home, do as they did, and my presence would make no difference. I am not depressed, and I know my friends care for me, but my feeling here was deep set emotional issues with my character. I felt like I was a side character, like my life was never to be "great". As a historian, an academic, a photographer, I was sidelined to recording, obsessing over memory and knowledge, but never blazing trail ahead into the unknown like the heroes of old. I felt this is why I tend to be uncompetitive, why I don't talk shit when I play games, why I don't fight, why I tend to be a patient person, that I'm complacent, and accept my place on the sidelines of the world. I felt like in every room I've ever been in I was part of someone else's story, never making my own. I think this was due to the residual loss of identity I had from earlier, I was still not feeling like myself, but at least I could think about "myself" without collapsing back into that feeling of only being animal impulses. I wanted so badly for someone to come into my room and find me, for someone to help me back out, I felt so so weak, probably the lowest I've ever felt in my entire life. I could have held my breath and just stopped breathing then and there, as I was so convinced that I was burdrned with this curse of failing to be anyone, that trying to be anyone was worthless. If there is a god out there, I called for him to help me, to tell me that I could be someone, to tell me it was going to be okay. Nobody answered.
At this point I'm not sure how long I lay there, but I genuinely had zero thoughts. Nothing. I heard people coming home and talking through the walls but I couldn't begin to imagine being part of the conversation. I'd turned my speakers off too when Alex left earlier, I think I was trying to sleep. At some point I was able to move my legs Again and as the effects were wearing off, I was able to get out of bed. The visuals were far less intense now, just textures flowing, my sense of balance being off, but no vivid geometry anymore. I walked through the hallways, barefoot again, and found some friends to chat to and at this point, although a little spaced out and shaken, I felt like me again. They told me about what happened on that night out, and it seemed like there was just something in the water that day. Everyone had a story, and even though we were all fucked up and hungover, it felt good to be a person again
