PREFACE: The events in this report happened mid-june 2005 (before fresh shrooms were made illegal here in the UK). I wrote it up for my own enjoyment a little while later. I've been lurking on the bluelight for a while but this is my first post. THE CAST: R is a good mate from home, E & S were my housemates at uni.
I've had two previous mushroom experiences on Mexican mushrooms. Both times were at home with friends and both times we all got a bit giggly with very slight visual distortion - the toilet was trying to speak, the pavement was giving me evils, the wall paper looked spider shaped, that kind of thing. Both times were thoroughly enjoyable.
My third mushroom experience was at R's house in York. None of his 4 other housemates are much into drugs so we waited until they had gone out and the two of us took one shroom each knowing we had two more for later, if needed. These were Ecuadorian mushrooms that R got off some web site because the blurb said they were 'particularly visual'. Almost immediately after eating it I started to feel a bit sick which had never happened to me before. But then the familiar warm fuzzy feeling came on. After about 5-10 minutes I started seeing patterns on the walls of the living room but when I inspected them up close they weren't really there. Then I noticed that the patterns were spilling through the French windows onto the walls in the yard but again on close inspection the walls were plain. Soon the paving stones too had elaborate floral patterns on and by now I couldn't really tell, even kneeling on the ground, whether the patterns were actually there or not.
The sick feeling was coming and going but everything looked so amazing it didn't matter too much. R still seemed perfectly sober and was wandering around the yard outside. He called to me to come and see this plant which was "really intricate". I ignored him. The he came inside, picked up a stool and said "I'm going outside to watch the plant; it's really amazing" which made us both laugh uncontrollably for what seemed like several minutes.
At this stage I should mention that mushrooms are renowned for making you lose track of time. For this reason the experiences related below may not be in chronological order. I should also say that while I was at times concerned, confused, a little worried or possibly even scared, I was at no time terrified: this was a good trip.
The patterns on everything were flowing into each other much like in the Lounge Lizard scene in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. In particular the patterns on the lino kitchen floor were seeping up the walls and the shadows cast by the lamp shade were replicating themselves all over the room.
There had been some pretty heavy rain earlier in the day so the yard was a bit wet with a few puddles here and there. I had flip flops somewhere but was mainly walking around in bare feet. I did eventually try to look at R's amazing plant and I found it had so much going on I just couldn't look at it for more than a few seconds at a time. The rain had left droplets of water hanging off its leaves which, in the approaching dusk, were glistening in the street and house lights. Of course, that's a sober description of what it looked like - to me it was very noticeably breathing, had little faces all over the place and looked like it was either about to start talking or jump up and run away.
As I walked around the yard I would occasionally become aware that my mental self image had become very detached from my physical body. For instance I would be thinking that I was dancing around when I would catch a glimpse of my reflection in the windows and realise that not only was I not dancing but that my body wasn't in the same position I thought it was and sometimes that I wasn't even in the same part of the yard I thought I was. I could also hear myself speak as other people do, i.e. my voice sounded to me like recordings of my voice sound to me.
Throughout the evening I was acutely conscious of trying not to cause any permanent damage to anything. For this reason I left my wallet and mobile phone inside on the coffee table where they wouldn't get wet. I had a bit of a cold at the time and was using a hand-kerchief kindly loaned to me by R. I kept this with me but, possibly because I don't usually carry one, was constantly startled by it and often unable to work out what it was. When I did know what it was I couldn't work out if it was clean or if it was muddy, even when I brought it right up to my eyes. I was afraid that I might cause permanent damage to myself if I put a dirty hand-kerchief to my nose. Often when I was examining the bizarre object in my hand I would be unable to remember what my hand was. I remember prodding my arm without any idea as to what it was or what it was for. This inability to remember very basic things would come and go so that at times I didn't know what any part of my body was. Often I would think "Ha, ha! This is so funny. I must remember it so I can tell S." But then I wouldn't be able to remember who or what 'S' was or if he really existed. Ironically even though I couldn't remember even these basic things at the time I still remember the whole evening very vividly now, over a month later.
It often worried me that I couldn't see things any clearer near to my face than far away from it because everything was covered in these red, blue and yellow fractal-like worm patterns that were constantly moving. Even when I shut my eyes they were still there forming a kind of vortex away into the distance. What confused me even more was that I could see these intricate details in the distance even when I removed my glasses. I remember standing there repeatedly removing my glasses and replacing them, unable to decide whether I could see better with or without them.
R was aware that his housemates might be coming home and didn't really want to see them or them to see us so he tried to take us both outside. We went out of the back door but I was a bit concerned that perhaps I shouldn't be walking around the streets at night in bare feet. R was wearing my flip-flops at the time and although I frenziedly tried to explain to him that I didn't want to wear shoes he insisted on returning them to me. He went back inside to fetch his shoes while I danced around my flip flops on the pavement trying to work out if I should be wearing them or not. When he got back a man walked past which startled me considerably. I pointed at him and said in a very loud whisper "Look! There's a man!”
We must have been there on the pavement arguing about shoes for some time because the man had time to walk all the way around the block and emerge from the other side of the house to the sound of me exclaiming, in something above a whisper this time, "There's another man! OH MY GOD! IT'S THE SAME MAN!” At this point R realised that maybe taking me outside wasn't such a good idea so we went back in.
Later (or possibly earlier) I found myself lying in the corridor looking up at the ceiling except that the ceiling had become a wall as if the whole of the earth had been rotated 90 degrees. It was while lying there contemplating this strange occurrence that I moved into the phase that words cannot adequately describe. I forgot where I was. I forgot what I was doing. I knew I had taken mushrooms and I was also vaguely aware that at some point I had been on my way to Glastonbury with R but I didn't know if I was already there or if it had been and gone or if, maybe, I had just flipped out and was going to spend the rest of my days in a padded cell. I forgot who I was. I forgot what I was. I had absolutely no concept of time. At one time I felt that I was probably dying but I didn't know what death was, although I was vaguely aware that it was something I didn't want. I eventually came to the solipsistic conclusion, and I remember this very clearly, that nothing existed outside of my mind. Everything I could see and had ever seen, everyone I had ever known, the history of the world, the universe, the whole of time and the concept of time itself were all figments of my imagination.
Solipsism has always interested me in a mildly humorous way but at that moment I felt it and I knew it to be true.
Every now and then mine and R's paths would cross and we would 'talk'. In my mind I was often asking him long, complicated questions and was a bit bewildered by his lack of comprehension and seemingly meaningless answers. Having since discussed the whole episode I think the problem was that we were both mainly imagining talking to each other and only a few words here and there were being vocalised.
The clock fascinated me for some time because I realised that it was the only constant thing and that as long as it was continuously ticking that meant time was going forward. Unfortunately it did occasionally stop ticking and sometimes even went backwards so I moved on. But it was while I was sitting on the floor observing the clock that I decided I wanted a glass of water. Remembering that none of this actually existed outside of my mind, I realised that all I had to do was believe that I was at the sink for myself to be instantly transported there. I was a little upset when this didn't work but everything was so confusing anyway that it didn't bother me too much.
So I reluctantly crawled my way to the sink, opened up the cupboard underneath and started to climb in. I have drawn a little ASCII diagram of the cupboard, as seen from above, to help explain the following paragraph:
The left hand door of the cupboard is open as that was where I climbed in. I saw there was space over to the right so poked my head into it. I then saw another door (the cupboard's right-hand door) and, intrigued as to what was behind it, pushed it open. To my amazement there was an identical copy of R's kitchen with an identical copy of R in it. I came back out, stood up, and tried to explain that there was a parallel universe inside the cupboard. He didn't understand at which point I saw the sink, remembered what I had come for and poured myself a glass of water.
At some point R noticed that as we were wandering in and out of the house we were bringing lots of dirt in from the yard onto the living room floor. He said that we should be careful and I think this triggered my concern about permanent damage. For the rest of the evening I was unable to step through those French windows. I became trapped outside in a loop of madness. For some time I was happy bumbling about in the yard but eventually I felt I wanted to sit or lie down.
My reasoning went something like this:
I want to lie down but I can't lie down here because it's wet.
Therefore I must go inside but
* I can't go through the French windows because my feet are dirty and they will damage the carpet
* I can't go through the garage door because that also leads to a carpeted floor
* I can't take my shoes off because I'm not wearing any
* I can't put my shoes on because my feet are dirty
* I can't clean my feet because all of the floor out here is dirty and there's nothing dry to clean them on
Then I realised I wanted a drink and went through exactly the same reasoning process as above. During this period R was still walking in and out of the house but it didn't occur to me that if he could do it so could I. I eventually managed to get him to open the kitchen window which meant that I now had access to water without actually setting foot in the house. I say 'eventually' because for some reason R wouldn't do anything I asked him to without a detailed explanation of why it was necessary. The problem was that all I could usually remember was the current step in my chain of reasoning. This meant I couldn't explain why I needed him to open the kitchen window even though I knew it was currently the most important thing in the world.
I still really needed to sit down though and I wanted a corner to do it in. Two of the corners of the yard housed plants and one of the others had a large puddle in which left only one corner, over by the kitchen window. I ended up sitting on top of and entwined in a large mass of green hose pipe, sandwiched between two walls and a couple of potted ferns. I could still see the red, blue and yellow patterns and the ferns became covered in red, blue and yellow butterflies and other insects. I remember suddenly exclaiming "What the FUCK am I doing in the jungle?" and genuinely thinking I was stuck in some kind of mangrove swamp having no idea how I got there.
I was still occasionally aware that I was tripping and that most of this wasn't real and I decided that I needed to talk to a friend back in reality. Earlier in the evening I had received a call from E asking for the number of one of my dealers so I decided to phone her back. However I knew that in order to phone her I had to use my phone and I could only do that somewhere dry. I knew that I couldn't go inside so I decided to try to bring something dry outside. I managed to convince a very suspicious R to pass me an empty cardboard box through the kitchen window which I proceeded to shred and then sit on. I reached for my phone through the window and dialed E but by this time I had forgotten why I wanted to call her. I could hear everything I said to her as if I was someone else listening in on the conversation and at one point I thought that I was in the room with her on the phone to me. In the end it wasn't very helpful and I was aware that I might be doing permanent damage to my phone bill (although I couldn't remember what money was either, I was still aware that it was something I wanted).
Eventually, and I don't remember how I came up with this idea, I realised that I could get in the car, which was in the garage, because I didn't care if I did any permanent cosmetic damage to it. I got in the car and suddenly everything was fantastic. Not only did I have somewhere warm and dry to sit down but I could actually dry my feet in it which allowed me to go into the house and fetch my phone, some tissue paper (for my nose), biscuits and water. At this point everything stopped being slightly scary and became highly pleasant once more. I texted E telling her "I have everything I could possibly want, thank you very much" and I sat in the car listening to a local radio station called "Real Radio" which I found hilariously ironic.
From that point on things got more and more normal. I smoked a couple of spliffs and went to bed thoroughly exhausted.
The moral of this story is: that car saved my life and I am eternally indebted to it.
I've had two previous mushroom experiences on Mexican mushrooms. Both times were at home with friends and both times we all got a bit giggly with very slight visual distortion - the toilet was trying to speak, the pavement was giving me evils, the wall paper looked spider shaped, that kind of thing. Both times were thoroughly enjoyable.
My third mushroom experience was at R's house in York. None of his 4 other housemates are much into drugs so we waited until they had gone out and the two of us took one shroom each knowing we had two more for later, if needed. These were Ecuadorian mushrooms that R got off some web site because the blurb said they were 'particularly visual'. Almost immediately after eating it I started to feel a bit sick which had never happened to me before. But then the familiar warm fuzzy feeling came on. After about 5-10 minutes I started seeing patterns on the walls of the living room but when I inspected them up close they weren't really there. Then I noticed that the patterns were spilling through the French windows onto the walls in the yard but again on close inspection the walls were plain. Soon the paving stones too had elaborate floral patterns on and by now I couldn't really tell, even kneeling on the ground, whether the patterns were actually there or not.
The sick feeling was coming and going but everything looked so amazing it didn't matter too much. R still seemed perfectly sober and was wandering around the yard outside. He called to me to come and see this plant which was "really intricate". I ignored him. The he came inside, picked up a stool and said "I'm going outside to watch the plant; it's really amazing" which made us both laugh uncontrollably for what seemed like several minutes.
At this stage I should mention that mushrooms are renowned for making you lose track of time. For this reason the experiences related below may not be in chronological order. I should also say that while I was at times concerned, confused, a little worried or possibly even scared, I was at no time terrified: this was a good trip.
The patterns on everything were flowing into each other much like in the Lounge Lizard scene in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. In particular the patterns on the lino kitchen floor were seeping up the walls and the shadows cast by the lamp shade were replicating themselves all over the room.
There had been some pretty heavy rain earlier in the day so the yard was a bit wet with a few puddles here and there. I had flip flops somewhere but was mainly walking around in bare feet. I did eventually try to look at R's amazing plant and I found it had so much going on I just couldn't look at it for more than a few seconds at a time. The rain had left droplets of water hanging off its leaves which, in the approaching dusk, were glistening in the street and house lights. Of course, that's a sober description of what it looked like - to me it was very noticeably breathing, had little faces all over the place and looked like it was either about to start talking or jump up and run away.
As I walked around the yard I would occasionally become aware that my mental self image had become very detached from my physical body. For instance I would be thinking that I was dancing around when I would catch a glimpse of my reflection in the windows and realise that not only was I not dancing but that my body wasn't in the same position I thought it was and sometimes that I wasn't even in the same part of the yard I thought I was. I could also hear myself speak as other people do, i.e. my voice sounded to me like recordings of my voice sound to me.
Throughout the evening I was acutely conscious of trying not to cause any permanent damage to anything. For this reason I left my wallet and mobile phone inside on the coffee table where they wouldn't get wet. I had a bit of a cold at the time and was using a hand-kerchief kindly loaned to me by R. I kept this with me but, possibly because I don't usually carry one, was constantly startled by it and often unable to work out what it was. When I did know what it was I couldn't work out if it was clean or if it was muddy, even when I brought it right up to my eyes. I was afraid that I might cause permanent damage to myself if I put a dirty hand-kerchief to my nose. Often when I was examining the bizarre object in my hand I would be unable to remember what my hand was. I remember prodding my arm without any idea as to what it was or what it was for. This inability to remember very basic things would come and go so that at times I didn't know what any part of my body was. Often I would think "Ha, ha! This is so funny. I must remember it so I can tell S." But then I wouldn't be able to remember who or what 'S' was or if he really existed. Ironically even though I couldn't remember even these basic things at the time I still remember the whole evening very vividly now, over a month later.
It often worried me that I couldn't see things any clearer near to my face than far away from it because everything was covered in these red, blue and yellow fractal-like worm patterns that were constantly moving. Even when I shut my eyes they were still there forming a kind of vortex away into the distance. What confused me even more was that I could see these intricate details in the distance even when I removed my glasses. I remember standing there repeatedly removing my glasses and replacing them, unable to decide whether I could see better with or without them.
R was aware that his housemates might be coming home and didn't really want to see them or them to see us so he tried to take us both outside. We went out of the back door but I was a bit concerned that perhaps I shouldn't be walking around the streets at night in bare feet. R was wearing my flip-flops at the time and although I frenziedly tried to explain to him that I didn't want to wear shoes he insisted on returning them to me. He went back inside to fetch his shoes while I danced around my flip flops on the pavement trying to work out if I should be wearing them or not. When he got back a man walked past which startled me considerably. I pointed at him and said in a very loud whisper "Look! There's a man!”
We must have been there on the pavement arguing about shoes for some time because the man had time to walk all the way around the block and emerge from the other side of the house to the sound of me exclaiming, in something above a whisper this time, "There's another man! OH MY GOD! IT'S THE SAME MAN!” At this point R realised that maybe taking me outside wasn't such a good idea so we went back in.
Later (or possibly earlier) I found myself lying in the corridor looking up at the ceiling except that the ceiling had become a wall as if the whole of the earth had been rotated 90 degrees. It was while lying there contemplating this strange occurrence that I moved into the phase that words cannot adequately describe. I forgot where I was. I forgot what I was doing. I knew I had taken mushrooms and I was also vaguely aware that at some point I had been on my way to Glastonbury with R but I didn't know if I was already there or if it had been and gone or if, maybe, I had just flipped out and was going to spend the rest of my days in a padded cell. I forgot who I was. I forgot what I was. I had absolutely no concept of time. At one time I felt that I was probably dying but I didn't know what death was, although I was vaguely aware that it was something I didn't want. I eventually came to the solipsistic conclusion, and I remember this very clearly, that nothing existed outside of my mind. Everything I could see and had ever seen, everyone I had ever known, the history of the world, the universe, the whole of time and the concept of time itself were all figments of my imagination.
Solipsism has always interested me in a mildly humorous way but at that moment I felt it and I knew it to be true.
Every now and then mine and R's paths would cross and we would 'talk'. In my mind I was often asking him long, complicated questions and was a bit bewildered by his lack of comprehension and seemingly meaningless answers. Having since discussed the whole episode I think the problem was that we were both mainly imagining talking to each other and only a few words here and there were being vocalised.
The clock fascinated me for some time because I realised that it was the only constant thing and that as long as it was continuously ticking that meant time was going forward. Unfortunately it did occasionally stop ticking and sometimes even went backwards so I moved on. But it was while I was sitting on the floor observing the clock that I decided I wanted a glass of water. Remembering that none of this actually existed outside of my mind, I realised that all I had to do was believe that I was at the sink for myself to be instantly transported there. I was a little upset when this didn't work but everything was so confusing anyway that it didn't bother me too much.
So I reluctantly crawled my way to the sink, opened up the cupboard underneath and started to climb in. I have drawn a little ASCII diagram of the cupboard, as seen from above, to help explain the following paragraph:
Code:
_________
| |
| .___|
\
\At some point R noticed that as we were wandering in and out of the house we were bringing lots of dirt in from the yard onto the living room floor. He said that we should be careful and I think this triggered my concern about permanent damage. For the rest of the evening I was unable to step through those French windows. I became trapped outside in a loop of madness. For some time I was happy bumbling about in the yard but eventually I felt I wanted to sit or lie down.
My reasoning went something like this:
I want to lie down but I can't lie down here because it's wet.
Therefore I must go inside but
* I can't go through the French windows because my feet are dirty and they will damage the carpet
* I can't go through the garage door because that also leads to a carpeted floor
* I can't take my shoes off because I'm not wearing any
* I can't put my shoes on because my feet are dirty
* I can't clean my feet because all of the floor out here is dirty and there's nothing dry to clean them on
Then I realised I wanted a drink and went through exactly the same reasoning process as above. During this period R was still walking in and out of the house but it didn't occur to me that if he could do it so could I. I eventually managed to get him to open the kitchen window which meant that I now had access to water without actually setting foot in the house. I say 'eventually' because for some reason R wouldn't do anything I asked him to without a detailed explanation of why it was necessary. The problem was that all I could usually remember was the current step in my chain of reasoning. This meant I couldn't explain why I needed him to open the kitchen window even though I knew it was currently the most important thing in the world.
I still really needed to sit down though and I wanted a corner to do it in. Two of the corners of the yard housed plants and one of the others had a large puddle in which left only one corner, over by the kitchen window. I ended up sitting on top of and entwined in a large mass of green hose pipe, sandwiched between two walls and a couple of potted ferns. I could still see the red, blue and yellow patterns and the ferns became covered in red, blue and yellow butterflies and other insects. I remember suddenly exclaiming "What the FUCK am I doing in the jungle?" and genuinely thinking I was stuck in some kind of mangrove swamp having no idea how I got there.
I was still occasionally aware that I was tripping and that most of this wasn't real and I decided that I needed to talk to a friend back in reality. Earlier in the evening I had received a call from E asking for the number of one of my dealers so I decided to phone her back. However I knew that in order to phone her I had to use my phone and I could only do that somewhere dry. I knew that I couldn't go inside so I decided to try to bring something dry outside. I managed to convince a very suspicious R to pass me an empty cardboard box through the kitchen window which I proceeded to shred and then sit on. I reached for my phone through the window and dialed E but by this time I had forgotten why I wanted to call her. I could hear everything I said to her as if I was someone else listening in on the conversation and at one point I thought that I was in the room with her on the phone to me. In the end it wasn't very helpful and I was aware that I might be doing permanent damage to my phone bill (although I couldn't remember what money was either, I was still aware that it was something I wanted).
Eventually, and I don't remember how I came up with this idea, I realised that I could get in the car, which was in the garage, because I didn't care if I did any permanent cosmetic damage to it. I got in the car and suddenly everything was fantastic. Not only did I have somewhere warm and dry to sit down but I could actually dry my feet in it which allowed me to go into the house and fetch my phone, some tissue paper (for my nose), biscuits and water. At this point everything stopped being slightly scary and became highly pleasant once more. I texted E telling her "I have everything I could possibly want, thank you very much" and I sat in the car listening to a local radio station called "Real Radio" which I found hilariously ironic.
From that point on things got more and more normal. I smoked a couple of spliffs and went to bed thoroughly exhausted.
The moral of this story is: that car saved my life and I am eternally indebted to it.
