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Datura - 1st time - Mad Goddess Of Confusion

Lawrence Arms

Bluelighter
Joined
Mar 16, 2004
Messages
619
Datura-1st time-Mad Goddess Of COnfusion

I would just like to say that this is not my report, just a report i found on a probably not very popular site, so i thought id share, since i know i love reading them. I would also like to try this, but for sure not untill i have my own place.
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This is the first and mildest of my datura experiences, which took place in the fall of 1995. A friend (who always got there first) was visiting me in Texas on his way to Mexico and South America. In preparation for his trip, he had been reading Jim DeKorne's Psychedelic Shamanism and became particularly intrigued by the descriptions of the belladonna alkaloids. In his description, DeKorne mentions, quite cryptically, a specific plant on highway 290 between Austin and the town of Fredericksburg. Based on this scanty information, my friend Jefe (as I will call him) decided to cruise off for a few days on a side trip to New Mexico, seeing if he could find 'the woman in question' along the way.
A few days later, Jefe returned with not only interesting stories about solitary datura trips in various state parks in southern New Mexico, but he had also managed to collect leaves from the very plant along highway 290 that DeKorne mentioned in his book! (This plant is now gone, either because it became too popular of a collecting spot or the recent publicity in Texas about datura led the owners of the field to destroy the plant.) Jefe always had had a gift for communicating with plants, but to have found this plant at about 30 yards distance from the road was impressive!

OK, enough historical information, and on to the real deal. We brewed up a large pot of datura tea, about the color of good herbal tea, a bit lighter than English tea. We washed it down with lemon and a shitload of sugar. I had a CD on the stereo and we sat and chilled out and waited for it to take effect.

I have to say that at this point, the stories Jefe had told me about finding the plant along the road and what had happened to him in the park in NM seemed too fanciful for me to believe. I only believed him because we had both been through some pretty serious acid/psilocybin/DM trips before and I knew where he was coming from. We sat there and waited for it to kick in, I think smoking a little in the process.

I started to feel a little tingling but not really tripping in my mind. Quite skeptical, I think I had to get up and take a whiz. Jefe said something like 'when you try to walk, that's when you'll realize you're fucked up...just try it, you'll see...' Sure enough, when I stood up and turned my body to walk toward the bathroom, I realized my sense of balance was whacked. I felt like I was going to fall at any moment, like on ketamine, but my legs were so heavy that, paradoxically, they anchored me to the ground in some way. It seemingly took me 20 minutes to plod my way to the bathroom. When I finally got down to business, I couldn't stand straight up and consequently my piss was going everywhere on the bathroom floor rather than in the toilet bowl. I think after what seemed like 10 minutes of pissing I walked back to the living room and sat down, definitely acknowledging to my amigo that I was, indeed, FUCKED! My body was tingling, like an arm or a leg when it 'falls asleep' but much more severely, and all over. I was glad I pissed when I did because every second it seemed to get more intense and I could now not get up from the sofa even if I wanted to. I felt an increasing buzzing in my head, like I had just been smacked in the head, dizzy a bit. That's the last I remember of the 'separatory' phase.

When I woke up, Jefe was not there. I got up from the couch, COMPLETELY FORGETTING THAT I HAD TAKEN DATURA, thinking that maybe I had fallen asleep reading a book and having a few beers, which I was used to doing. I had a stomach ache and had lost all circulation to my legs and ass, which were very cold. I somehow had the presence of mind, if you could call it that, to think to take a shower to warm up and get my circulation going again. I got the shower on and about half of my clothes off, and then I must have forgotten about the shower and walked off. I paced around my apartment, walking in and out of the bathroom. A person from the cafe I worked in was in my bathroom, mopping my floor. I thought it was kind of strange that they would be in my house, but I was more than happy that they were there, helping me do my housework which I never seemed to be able to keep under control. As they were mopping the floor, the shower was on. It remained on all night, in fact, which must have made the neighbors suspicious!

I lose a little time/ space/ causality in this part of the narrative. I should mention before I go on that for a long time before the trip I had been working in a cafe, and this job consumed most of my attention, unfortunately. I was suddenly at my job in the cafe, standing behind the counter, with the cash register in front of me and the espresso machine and refrigerator for milk behind me. I took orders from customers, grabbed the appropriate glass, made whatever drink they wanted, then served it on the counter, asked for money, and rung up the transaction, just like at work. Everything seemed to be going OK, but a few of the customers had rather strange looks on their faces, that faraway, demonic look that datura entities can sometimes take. The folds in their skin were very pronounced, and their eyes had that emptiness that is something less than human. I found myself making drinks for people who suddenly turned away as soon as I served them. After the third or fourth time, I began to get really pissed and yell at them. That didn't help. They wouldn't say anything back, just stare at me with that infuriating gaze.

Later I figured out that the layout of my kitchen, while definitely different from the layout of the cafe, was similar enough for my mind to 'fill in the gaps' and go ahead and hallucinate the cafe. I had a counter kind of like the one at work, the stove became the cash register, and the sink became the espresso machine. The cabinet under the sink was the refrigerator under the machine. This may seem like trivial detail, but imagine my surprise when I discovered, the next day, cartons of milk under the sink, and the fact that I had completely ripped the spigot off of the sink because I thought it was the steam wand of the espresso machine! I remember being pissed off that the steam wand wasn't working properly, so I grabbed it and moved it back and forth, I guess enough to break it. Also, and I don't know exactly how, I got a hold of some coins. I guess I had a jar of pennies on the counter close to where the 'tip jar' was at work, and for some reason I had the idea to fry the coins in a frying pan over high heat. I remember doing this, I just can't remember the rationale behind it. I recall that once the pan began to blacken on the bottom, and a funky burning-metal smell started to manifest, I realized that it was a bad idea, so I took the pan off and moved it over to the sink and put water on the coins. I then dumped them down the disposal, which of course broke the next time I tried to use it. (I didn't remember this phase of the trip until the maintenance guy came by a week or two later to fix the disposal and found a bunch of burnt coins down there!)

Another phase of the trip that was memorable was the Rainbow Gathering in my apartment. I have never known any Rainbows, so I don't know where this came from, but I always thought they were harmless enough people. Anyway, I noticed that after I 'quit my job' (walked away from work and hence disintegrated the cafe-hallucination) I 'came home' to find that there was an impromptu Rainbow Gathering being held in my apartment. After what I had been through, this was a welcome change, and I sat down and grabbed a drink and started talking to people. There were about 25 people in my small apartment, dressed in their outdoor gear, and all of their backpacks, bedrolls, tents, etc, were stacked up against the far wall. I had great conversations with people for what seemed like a few hours, at least. I remember talking at length about particular topics, shaking hands and feeling the other person's hand, and even getting a few big bear hugs, one of which I remember in particular, from a big burly guy, lifted me off of the ground! I looked down at my feet, and I was off the ground, and when he let me back down, I felt my feet hitting the floor with a thud. This is that aspect of datura, that the hallucinations are TOTALLY REALISTIC and you have no point of reference to 'normal' consciousness. Nothing could have convinced me that the people with whom I was interacting, having conversation, touching, were not real. Eventually, as I recall, I got a little tired and started to want them to leave. I guess I figured they were just passing through and had stopped by, and I didn't want them to get the idea that they could stay overnight. So somehow I kicked them out. As they left, I shook hands with the guys and hugged the girls, each one. As I was standing outside my apartment on the front lawn of the house, where all my neighbors could see (it was broad daylight) I must have looked like an idiot, hugging and talking to thin air!

Also, at some point, I managed to lose my car keys. I built up a huge hallucination that a gang of 3 guys had cruised by and stolen my keys, which resulted in me calling the police and reporting them. The 911 operator sounded taken aback, which I thought must be quite a feat given what they hear on the job, and she said 'I'm just going to read this back to you so you can make sure that this is what you want to go on record...' and I hear in her voice 'YOU ARE FUCKING NUTS! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?' It was then that I began to realize that I had intersected another reality but needed to come back. I told her 'Never mind!' and hung up. I sat there for a few minutes. Soon, my girlfriend came home (who had gone away for the evening, knowing that Jefe and I were going to do datura) and she started to listen to my crazy tales and talk me down, plateau by plateau, step by step. She was obviously very frightened by how intense my delusions were. It was then that Jefe 'rematerialized' and started trying to talk me down, too. He had been there the whole time, sitting there on the couch right where he had passed out some 12 hours ago, but my mind had blocked him out completely.

All in all, I was confused, humiliated, and lost. In fact I stayed lost for quite a long time. My apartment was wrecked from the delusion that it was my workplace. There were a lot of weird random things, like the bar of soap with a bite-mark taken out of it in the cat's litter box and some books wrapped in cellophane at the bottom of the trash can, underneath the trash bag. Jefe and I had a big argument over who took the bite out of the soap: I maintained that I couldn't have done it since I would have remembered it. My girlfriend had us each bite out of a piece of bread to see whose mouth-marks matched the one in the soap most closely. Of course, it was my mouth! But the humor was lost on me, since I was so blown away from the experience. I had to rethink my whole relationship to my mind and my sanity.

I remember the phrase of William James, I think, of the 'thin film' which separates our normal awareness from the ocean of hallucinatory and nondifferentiated perception that is right next to us all the time, but that we are somehow shielded from. This phrase is often used by LSD writers to describe that particular trip, but I think it comes much closer to the mark of datura. I guess there's no way to understand it unless you have the full-blown trip. I realized that sanity, and normalcy, is a VERY fragile, tenuously balanced state that we take for granted all too often. I wouldn't recommend this experience, as it can be quite traumatizing and demoralizing, and takes quite a bit of time to recover from. I know that warning not to do it won't really do anything to prevent people from doing it, in fact it might have the opposite effect. I can just hope that the plant herself will discriminate mercifully, and not vindictively, against those who approach her with flippancy
 
Whhhhoooooaaaa yeah, Datura reports definitely blow every other report out of the water if they are strong ones :)

Never fails to amaze me when I read one... something different and unique each time yet the same delusional insanity.

Thanks for postin
 
Why anyone would *want* to put this substance in their body is beyond me.. but I do love reading the reports! So keep it up!
 
Nice report!

I tried it in the seventies. Datura is a once in a liftime, ok maybe twice, experience! i'm still considering a second time around! Not!!!!

The only thing i will say is; Dature is so real, that i never knew i was hallucinating! I only knew i was on, was when a vision disappeared! Only because a load sound or movment behind me distracted me away form what i thought was real. Then i was somewhere or someplace else talking to friends, eating etc... that really where not there at all.
as Teranc Mckenna said "it isant what it apears to be"

I belive a trip sitter is a must and stay far, far away from a city too.
some one may think a freeway full of cars is a swimming pool instead!
be carfull people!
 
Ah, Datura is one of those things that I know is just not for me. Ever. Like PCP.

Still, it's a well written report, I presume it's original author is some kind of professional writer / reviewer?

And heh, I got a warm fuzzy feeling inside when reading about the "getting off the couch and completely forgetting i'd ingested datura" part, many many times have I had LSD and totally forgotten until much later and loudly gasped "Oh!" :D
 
LMFAO....I'm sorry you had such a bad time,but i couldn't stop giggling;)
One of myfavourite trip reports.

If i could take Datura somewhere like a hospital,in a research program type setting,ICU ready to go or whatever,I'd definately be up for it
 
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