Date: 8 March 2003
Dose: Roughly 2.5 grams of p. cubensis, ingested in a milkshake
Body weight: 140 lbs
Set: Optimistic, excited, slightly apprehensive
Setting: College dorm room and then around the most beautiful college campus in the world
Cast of Characters:
H, a semi-experienced shroomer
A, H's roommate, on his 2nd trip
M, another friend, her first time too
T, one of our "sober sitters"
and N, the other "sober" sitter, who was pretty damn drunk, making for an interesting group dynamic.
I was pretty excited when I heard from a friend that he'd finally been able to find some mushrooms, since I'd been wanting for some time to experience them. A couple other friends wanted to try it as well, and so we set the date of March 8 to get our shroom on.
This whole week leading up to last night, I'd been definitely looking forward to it - a little apprehensive, but not terribly nervous, mostly just excited. When the night finally came, we all met in H and A's room and waited for our "shroom guy" to get there. We ended up buying three 8ths to split between the 4 of us. We decided to take them by making them into smoothies, so we walked down to the kitchen and made smoothies out of pineapple juice, ice, ice cream, and mushrooms.
We started drinking the smoothies at about 10:35 PM. They weren't all that bad, though admittedly you could vaguely taste something else in them. We decided it would be a good idea to drink half of our smoothies, wait until we felt something, and then drink the other half, to keep from overdoing it. We finished them around 11:15, and sat in H and A's room watching Sealab 2021 and South Park until something started happening.
The first thing I felt was a bit of a body high - I couldn't tell if it was the caffeine I'd had at dinner coming back, at first, it was a very similar feeling. Things started rippling, ever so gently, and one poster on the wall sort of floated in the air, rather than being attached to the wall. I remember everything was funny. It seemed at first that I was laughing to ease the tension, but then I relaxed, and everything became truly funny.
At one point, probably about 15 minutes after I first started feeling the effects (sorry my times aren't that accurate, I sort of lost track) I went to the bathroom. while I was sitting on the toilet, the hum of the fluorescent light seemed to put me into a bit of a trance. It was like this amorphous thing was creeping up on me if I allowed myself to listen to the light, and it would overtake me if I let it. I noticed at this point that the giggling and smiling seemed to keep the bad, scary ideas away. After I left the bathroom, we were getting ready to leave to go for our walk, and as we stood there getting ready, I stared in the mirror at myself and noticed that I felt like an anime character.
We were all standing by the door putting our shoes on when I announced, "I feel as though if I stop smiling, something terrible will happen." Everybody laughed, and it made me realize that they felt the same way too.
We set off on a journey into a completely changed world. By this point every color looked like a newly invented color, every surface looked like its complexity was infinate, and every place looked brand-new, even places I'd been a hundred times. We walked across a field (stopping to admire and/or be slightly afraid of trees every 10 feet, which slightly annoyed our drunk sober sitter), across a road, and to a parking garage. Climbing the stairs to the top of the parking garage would normally seem like a workout, but my energy seemed infinate. The view from the top was amazing - we could see the entire campus, as well as lots of the area around. The parking garage is on the more industrial side of campus, so there were lots of perpendicular lines, lots of mercury-vapor lights, and lots of pipes running in various directions, which made for a lot of cool stuff to look at. My depth perception seemed to be fucking with me - I would look at one tree, look at something else and then look back at the tree, and it would seem a lot closer.
We rode the elevator down to the bottom of the garage and continued on our journey, next through the science and engineering part of campus. I honestly never noticed how many trees there were there, and i couldn't stop saying, "I KNOW these trees aren't here in reality." But they are, I just never noticed them before. That was the main thing that struck me about my new perception of reality - the trees seemed so much more important.
From there we walked into the main quad, and found an open building. Most of us needed to pee by this time, and it was kind of cold, so we went inside and warmed up and refreshed ourselves. The carpet in the building we were in has a very small diamond pattern, yellow on green, and the squares on it seemed to be morphing into different shapes as I walked down the hall. At one point while we were inside, I found a book return slot and crouched next to it and peered inside. It felt almost as if I were pouring into the slot, like the slot was opening up to let me through. It didn't, of course, and we decided to go back outside and keep walking.
The walkway around the quad at my school is tiled in square tiles, turned so that they are diagonal to the walkway, and a checkerboard, reddish and whitish stones. It's so perfectly symmetrical and orderly, but while we were walking down a very long stretch of the walkway, the tiles would seem perfectly square in the distance, but when they got to us (or when we got to them), every imperfection, every chip in the tile, every scuff mark was magnified, and the lines seemed a lot less straight. A very cool effect.
At this point, we walked farther away from campus, toward the art center. Our school has a huge collection of bronze Rodin sculptures, if you don't know what kind of work Rodin did, he did the Thinker, and many similar works. Lots of the people portrayed in his larger-than-life sculptures appear to be tortured and disfigured, as if they are in agony. The centerpiece to the garden, however, is a huge relief depicting the Gates of Hell. Now, you'd think that we, being on shrooms, and standing in front of the gates of hell, would be frightened, but there was none of that. I put my hands on the sculptures and tried to bend them, and touched every surface I could.
A stopped to have a cigarette at this point, and I was recommended to try having one, not for the effect the nicotine would have on me, but for the experience of watching myself smoke it. I think I took about 3 or 4 drags off the cigarette, I just watched it burn. Little bits of paper would catch, embers would fall off... it was a very beautiful process.
One thing I remember seeing the whole night was the same face, repeated many, many times across a surface, in different sizes. Sometimes the faces would come together to create a larger face, like those photomosaics that were popular a few years ago. The cigarette definitely had many faces on it, which was really cool to watch.
You know, it's unfortunate that I'm not able to do justice to the experience I was having. There are just some things that I can't put into words. I can say that I think it was roughly a level 2.5 trip, but the amazing beauty I experienced is not something that I can really relate.
From the Gates of Hell, we decided that we were cold and that we would walk back. It's a long walk from there back to A and H's dorm, but it didn't seem to matter how long it was taking. I was just amazed at the beauty of this world I was in. I described it to our drunk sitter as having "this shade pulled down across the world... that just makes everything more beautiful. And everything you see and everything you feel comes to you through this beauty filter - like magic glasses." I knew it just wasn't quite reality, but it was so amazingly beautiful.
When we got back to A and H's dorm, we ran into another friend (let's call her C) who had gone to the gelato store and brought us a pint of gelato (Italian ice cream - super-good). We all had tastes of these new flavors - chocolate and ginger - and agreed that the way they felt melting on our tongues was really, really cool. C is a trip in and of herself. I've never seen her, actually, when I wasn't stoned or shrooming, so I'm not entirely convinced she really exists. Anyway, the gelato was amazing, and we're grateful to her for bringing it.
Throughout the trip, I kept getting the feeling from memories that I have that I have had these moments in the past that were "shroom moments" - a fleeting moment where you realize just how beautiful the world around you is, and you just absorb it all. Several memories stuck in my head during the trip - like a walk my boyfriend and I took through a research lab building after dark one night, one time when I was waiting for a bus in San Francisco... little things like that, I felt, integrated into the reality I was experiencing. Kinda weird.
The last part of the evening consisted of me leaving everyone at A and H's dorm and going back to my boyfriend's dorm, where he was already asleep. I had brought a pear over since I thought it might be cool to eat, and it was the most delicious pear I've ever eaten - the juice was dripping down my chin and hands... yum. After I ate the pear, I crawled into bed and eventually fell asleep, probably sometime around 4.
I woke up this morning at 9:30 feeling refreshed and ready to go, and other than one nap this afternoon, I havent' been too tired or anything at all. I did have a few weird dreams (those dreams where you think you've gotten up, only to realize you're still in bed...) and had a lot of trouble getting out of bed, which was probably a result of the mushrooms, but other than that, the entire experience was overwhelmingly positive. I'd recommend it to anyone who is even mildly interested - if you don't take too much, and you're with people you like and trust, you'll have a great time.
Dose: Roughly 2.5 grams of p. cubensis, ingested in a milkshake
Body weight: 140 lbs
Set: Optimistic, excited, slightly apprehensive
Setting: College dorm room and then around the most beautiful college campus in the world
Cast of Characters:
H, a semi-experienced shroomer
A, H's roommate, on his 2nd trip
M, another friend, her first time too
T, one of our "sober sitters"
and N, the other "sober" sitter, who was pretty damn drunk, making for an interesting group dynamic.
I was pretty excited when I heard from a friend that he'd finally been able to find some mushrooms, since I'd been wanting for some time to experience them. A couple other friends wanted to try it as well, and so we set the date of March 8 to get our shroom on.
This whole week leading up to last night, I'd been definitely looking forward to it - a little apprehensive, but not terribly nervous, mostly just excited. When the night finally came, we all met in H and A's room and waited for our "shroom guy" to get there. We ended up buying three 8ths to split between the 4 of us. We decided to take them by making them into smoothies, so we walked down to the kitchen and made smoothies out of pineapple juice, ice, ice cream, and mushrooms.
We started drinking the smoothies at about 10:35 PM. They weren't all that bad, though admittedly you could vaguely taste something else in them. We decided it would be a good idea to drink half of our smoothies, wait until we felt something, and then drink the other half, to keep from overdoing it. We finished them around 11:15, and sat in H and A's room watching Sealab 2021 and South Park until something started happening.
The first thing I felt was a bit of a body high - I couldn't tell if it was the caffeine I'd had at dinner coming back, at first, it was a very similar feeling. Things started rippling, ever so gently, and one poster on the wall sort of floated in the air, rather than being attached to the wall. I remember everything was funny. It seemed at first that I was laughing to ease the tension, but then I relaxed, and everything became truly funny.
At one point, probably about 15 minutes after I first started feeling the effects (sorry my times aren't that accurate, I sort of lost track) I went to the bathroom. while I was sitting on the toilet, the hum of the fluorescent light seemed to put me into a bit of a trance. It was like this amorphous thing was creeping up on me if I allowed myself to listen to the light, and it would overtake me if I let it. I noticed at this point that the giggling and smiling seemed to keep the bad, scary ideas away. After I left the bathroom, we were getting ready to leave to go for our walk, and as we stood there getting ready, I stared in the mirror at myself and noticed that I felt like an anime character.
We were all standing by the door putting our shoes on when I announced, "I feel as though if I stop smiling, something terrible will happen." Everybody laughed, and it made me realize that they felt the same way too.
We set off on a journey into a completely changed world. By this point every color looked like a newly invented color, every surface looked like its complexity was infinate, and every place looked brand-new, even places I'd been a hundred times. We walked across a field (stopping to admire and/or be slightly afraid of trees every 10 feet, which slightly annoyed our drunk sober sitter), across a road, and to a parking garage. Climbing the stairs to the top of the parking garage would normally seem like a workout, but my energy seemed infinate. The view from the top was amazing - we could see the entire campus, as well as lots of the area around. The parking garage is on the more industrial side of campus, so there were lots of perpendicular lines, lots of mercury-vapor lights, and lots of pipes running in various directions, which made for a lot of cool stuff to look at. My depth perception seemed to be fucking with me - I would look at one tree, look at something else and then look back at the tree, and it would seem a lot closer.
We rode the elevator down to the bottom of the garage and continued on our journey, next through the science and engineering part of campus. I honestly never noticed how many trees there were there, and i couldn't stop saying, "I KNOW these trees aren't here in reality." But they are, I just never noticed them before. That was the main thing that struck me about my new perception of reality - the trees seemed so much more important.
From there we walked into the main quad, and found an open building. Most of us needed to pee by this time, and it was kind of cold, so we went inside and warmed up and refreshed ourselves. The carpet in the building we were in has a very small diamond pattern, yellow on green, and the squares on it seemed to be morphing into different shapes as I walked down the hall. At one point while we were inside, I found a book return slot and crouched next to it and peered inside. It felt almost as if I were pouring into the slot, like the slot was opening up to let me through. It didn't, of course, and we decided to go back outside and keep walking.
The walkway around the quad at my school is tiled in square tiles, turned so that they are diagonal to the walkway, and a checkerboard, reddish and whitish stones. It's so perfectly symmetrical and orderly, but while we were walking down a very long stretch of the walkway, the tiles would seem perfectly square in the distance, but when they got to us (or when we got to them), every imperfection, every chip in the tile, every scuff mark was magnified, and the lines seemed a lot less straight. A very cool effect.
At this point, we walked farther away from campus, toward the art center. Our school has a huge collection of bronze Rodin sculptures, if you don't know what kind of work Rodin did, he did the Thinker, and many similar works. Lots of the people portrayed in his larger-than-life sculptures appear to be tortured and disfigured, as if they are in agony. The centerpiece to the garden, however, is a huge relief depicting the Gates of Hell. Now, you'd think that we, being on shrooms, and standing in front of the gates of hell, would be frightened, but there was none of that. I put my hands on the sculptures and tried to bend them, and touched every surface I could.
A stopped to have a cigarette at this point, and I was recommended to try having one, not for the effect the nicotine would have on me, but for the experience of watching myself smoke it. I think I took about 3 or 4 drags off the cigarette, I just watched it burn. Little bits of paper would catch, embers would fall off... it was a very beautiful process.
One thing I remember seeing the whole night was the same face, repeated many, many times across a surface, in different sizes. Sometimes the faces would come together to create a larger face, like those photomosaics that were popular a few years ago. The cigarette definitely had many faces on it, which was really cool to watch.
You know, it's unfortunate that I'm not able to do justice to the experience I was having. There are just some things that I can't put into words. I can say that I think it was roughly a level 2.5 trip, but the amazing beauty I experienced is not something that I can really relate.
From the Gates of Hell, we decided that we were cold and that we would walk back. It's a long walk from there back to A and H's dorm, but it didn't seem to matter how long it was taking. I was just amazed at the beauty of this world I was in. I described it to our drunk sitter as having "this shade pulled down across the world... that just makes everything more beautiful. And everything you see and everything you feel comes to you through this beauty filter - like magic glasses." I knew it just wasn't quite reality, but it was so amazingly beautiful.
When we got back to A and H's dorm, we ran into another friend (let's call her C) who had gone to the gelato store and brought us a pint of gelato (Italian ice cream - super-good). We all had tastes of these new flavors - chocolate and ginger - and agreed that the way they felt melting on our tongues was really, really cool. C is a trip in and of herself. I've never seen her, actually, when I wasn't stoned or shrooming, so I'm not entirely convinced she really exists. Anyway, the gelato was amazing, and we're grateful to her for bringing it.
Throughout the trip, I kept getting the feeling from memories that I have that I have had these moments in the past that were "shroom moments" - a fleeting moment where you realize just how beautiful the world around you is, and you just absorb it all. Several memories stuck in my head during the trip - like a walk my boyfriend and I took through a research lab building after dark one night, one time when I was waiting for a bus in San Francisco... little things like that, I felt, integrated into the reality I was experiencing. Kinda weird.
The last part of the evening consisted of me leaving everyone at A and H's dorm and going back to my boyfriend's dorm, where he was already asleep. I had brought a pear over since I thought it might be cool to eat, and it was the most delicious pear I've ever eaten - the juice was dripping down my chin and hands... yum. After I ate the pear, I crawled into bed and eventually fell asleep, probably sometime around 4.
I woke up this morning at 9:30 feeling refreshed and ready to go, and other than one nap this afternoon, I havent' been too tired or anything at all. I did have a few weird dreams (those dreams where you think you've gotten up, only to realize you're still in bed...) and had a lot of trouble getting out of bed, which was probably a result of the mushrooms, but other than that, the entire experience was overwhelmingly positive. I'd recommend it to anyone who is even mildly interested - if you don't take too much, and you're with people you like and trust, you'll have a great time.
but I also took 9.5 grams! You must have a low tolerance. Shrooms sure seem popular, there are 3 new trip reports now!
