LSD ++ Mushrooms

CW: Suicide, Mental illness, existential terror, violence, loss of autonomy

Age:18

Weight-130 lbs

Dose-2 tabs LSD, 3.5 g mushrooms

T0:00-Took 2 tabs of acid in a beach house. Leave to go to the beach shortly after.

T1:00-Coming up on the acid on the beach-mostly slight body effects such as the familiar feeling of floating. There are shafts of light piercing through the clouds and the entire sky and sea are dancing with patterns. Colors are brighter and everything seems to have a rainbow sheen. Friends decide to go to a diner.

T1:30-Perception of sound is very strange in the diner with sounds phasing in and out around me with a sort of Doppler Effect. Patterns are swimming and swirling on every surface, people’s faces are slightly shifting. Everyone looks very very strange- although they are not deformed, it’s as if the human face as it is had suddenly stopped being a familiar and accepted image and became something strange and alien. After lunch I go into the bathroom, where the visuals have become quite apparent- the walls are swirling and swimming around me, pulsing and breathing with harmonious and flowing patterns.

T2:20-Leave the diner and go back to the house. I’m getting the awkward social interaction I usually get from acid where I’m hyper aware of my own voice and inflection and in doing so completely lose a sense of how to use tone or inflection properly. Sunlight is filtering in through the windows, colorful rainbow wood grain patterns breathe and emboss themselves on the walls, I feel floaty, confident, euphoric, and my jaw is clenching. I feel awkward and am having trouble articulating sentences and finding the right words to use, so I retire to a quiet hallway to draw pictures by myself.

T4:00-The acid trip is tailing off. I can really only feel the physical effects anymore. Visuals and emotional effects are only noticeable if I try to notice them. At this point we’re waiting for the sun to go down so we can smoke weed. My social skills have mostly returned and I feel comfortable and euphoric in the presence of friends.

T5:00-The sun is down. We are preparing to go to the beach to smoke. I decide now is the time to take my mushrooms. I eat them with orange juice as a chaser across a period of about 15 minutes and then head to the beach. We struggle to light the bowl in the strong winds but eventually find a way and smoke several bowls.

T5:20-I sit down on the beach and stare out into the vast ocean. I can feel my body growing heavier and numbing away as the visuals begin to pick up. Tessellated spiral patterns mirror themselves on the sand and my entire field of vision appears to be mirroring itself and repeating. The light of boats on the horizon are beaming and swirling into the sky. I go back to where my friends are and sit down as they have intense and serious discussions about politics. I wish I could’ve participated but my brain was processing their words in a way that was ineffective for response and comprehension. Whenever I would talk, my voice would sound isolated and dreamy before trailing off into nothing.

T5:40-The conversation has shifted to the future, the scope of human progress, the entirety of humanity and its fate, the scope of our universe, of time, of everything leading up to now and everything to come. This is an amazing conversation to be having while on mushrooms and I am more actively and eagerly participating. Human constructs come up a lot, and there is a lot of talk about a new paradigm built from radical reinvention of what we consider human, about utterly dismantling every social and cultural construct and society built anew, aided by technology. As they discuss this, I look to the sky- rippling, pulsing, and exploding with the energy of time and the potential of the future. The town in the distance glows with glorious artificial light of the modern human, the entire earth is expanding around us. The great sky and the expanse of space above me, the vastness of nature on one side, the monuments of humanity on the other. I feel like a small little being on this great planet as it hurtles through time and space. As we talk, my friends begin to glow with auras, my depth perception fails and my entire vision is one flat plane with my friends amidst a sea of swirling, spinning dancing fractals and astral forms.

T6:10-I stand up because I need to pee really badly. Everything is downhill from here. Once, several months ago, I took Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds, and ever since then I’ve been afflicted with an occasional pulsing, tingling pain and a numbness on the inside of my thighs and all down my legs. I think I caused permanent vasoconstrictive damage. I feel it again this time, but very intense, probably from sitting in the same position with my legs folded for so long. I walk to the sea to pee in it. As I stumble forward with my throbbing aching legs I get the worst feeling of ominous premonition. I feel déjà vu, like I’ve experienced this in a dream, and it was my final moments. The patterns in the sand carved by the waves begin to mirror and swirl and tessellate to infinity. Each step feels like I’m stepping not on sand but on something solid, like wood, and it feels like the blood is hardening inside my body. I have had premonitions and feelings of coming death while tripping before, and each time it is accompanied by a swirling metallic sound, a sort of whining, with swings in pitch, and each step I take, that dizzying noise fills my ears and bounces around the sounds of the waves. This is it. This is my final trip. This is the one that kills me. I have deep vein thrombosis, my blood will clot in my legs and I will collapse into the sea and die. Normally I can keep calm while feelings of death come on, I accept it as a consequence of my actions, and even while I think that, it still triggers a physical panic response in me. As I pee, my friend runs around me, saying all sorts of things, I forget what they were and they were most likely friendly in nature, but I construe them as negative and malicious.

T6:20-I still don’t feel like I’ve totally lost control. I go back to where my friends are. The word bad trip is coming in my mind, I can feel the tendrils of ill thoughts, infinite loops, and unstoppable chains of negative ideas seeping into my brain, spreading like a cancer. Have you ever played the game with someone where you keep putting your hands on top of one another, infinitely topping each other? That is what my thoughts were doing, flowing from infinity right into one another, each one building on the last in an infinite untraceable stream, and I would keep having to cut off the chain of thought when the negativity began to creep in, cut if off before it consumed me. This was only sort of effective. We begin to walk back to the house. I need to get back, I need to lie down, I need somewhere warm and calm and safe to gather myself before things get worse. One vivid visual I remember is my friend running towards me. He seemed like he was going absurdly fast, like in an old movie. As he ran, his face multiplied until his entire body was just his face over and over again in the shape of his being. This was then replaced by his hands, until he became a running mess of extremities. As we walk back, I begin to have the racing thoughts of memories I get while on tryptamines. Only unlike other times, where every memory is warm and pleasant, these ones are cold and unwelcoming, I can only think of how uncomfortable I have been, how tedious every moment of existence is, how I will never feel good or comfortable and never have. I can only think about the cold negativity of every moment of my past, the bad drowning out any good. My heart has been racing this entire time.

T6:40-We get back inside. I do not recall what happened much, I remember walking around the house. I wasn’t in full suffering mode yet, but was facing a brutal existential crisis. Everything feels so wrong, so uncomfortable, there is so much suffering in the world and everyone feels so much suffering, and there is no way to avoid it. Any potential future I envision is filled with more tediousness, more unfulfilling mediocrity, more pain, more draining crushing depression and debilitating self-loathing. It’s completely inescapable and all I can do is laugh at my total despair. I sit next to a table, it looks alive, it feels alive, I can sense a life force in it. The corner looks like a huge grinning mouth. Normally while tripping I can appreciate the beauty in that, but in this instance my racing negative thoughts are giving me a headache and this living table is just a reminder of what I have done to myself. It only serves to incite even more painful thoughts.

T7:00- I sit in a room. A large group of people are having a spirited discussion about something I know a good bit about. I wish I could join but I can barely form words at this point. I feel even worse about this, I feel stupid and useless, I feel like I am condemned to always be stupid I useless. I am the fool, the jester who decided to take too many drugs in the presence of people who were content with weed and alcohol, the dunce who decided to silence himself and stifle his own thoughts in pursuit of hedonism. I sit and listen, barely comprehending the English language, before the discomfort and painful thoughts boil over. All I can think about is suffering. There is so much human suffering. In history people have experienced such incredible pain, physical, mental, emotional, and so often at the hands of the malice of others. And what could they do about it? They certainly weren’t able to stop themselves from feeling that pain, because it happened, because suffering is real and unavoidable, especially when some are purposely trying to inflict it on others. And I certainly wouldn’t be able to stop any suffering that came my way. I was lucky, I was fortunate that nothing terrible ever happened to me, I was lucky that I had never been dismembered or set on fire or beaten or tortured or maimed in a car accident, but it was such a fine line between my current life and that. And I was powerless. Completely and utterly powerless to stop any of that. And I was powerless to stop myself thinking about it, I had unwittingly opened a new paradigm, one where I could understand nothing but suffering, where every moment was experienced relative to the potential suffering I could be experiencing. So many terrible painful things could happen. I remember vividly, someone could run into this house, some madman, find me on the floor, rip off my fingernails, crush my limbs, splinter my bones, splatter my muscles, rip my organs apart, and what the fuck could I do to stop them? I was so vulnerable, I was so weak, I was so powerless, and because of that, incredible suffering felt inevitable, I had a premonition that my life in the future would be suffering I couldn’t even imagine at the current time.

T7:30-I run upstairs, I feel sick, I feel like my body is shutting down and I am losing control of my organs. I lock myself in the bathroom. I spend the next half hour sitting on the toilet, wishing this could end. Why did I do this, why did I ever enjoy tripping? I feel as though this trip has opened my eyes to a realm of anguish the likes of which I had never seen before. I would never be able to view the world in a pleasant away again, I had doomed myself to a bleak life of knowing only the yawning and infinite chasm of despair that I had dared to gaze into. I sat on the toilet, shaking violently, wanting to escape this burden of existence somehow, though I knew death would not even be an escape. Literally everything I could think about was crawling with negativity, there was a downside to every possible option that overpowered and destroyed any potential good side. My thoughts were racing and every single one hurt. I begin to imagine every fleeting moment, how exact and precise every occurrence in the world was. Normally, while tripping, I would appreciate the beauty of this, like thinking about a certain thing in a certain situation, how that would happen just once, and never happen again, how every specific instance swirled forth from the chaos. But instead of appreciating each moment, I cried in the tragedy of their fleetingness and their death, and in mourning for the astronomical amounts of moments that would never ever happen ever, for the ones that never did happen, for the ones that weren’t happening, for the ones that happened and never will happen again. The unfulfilled desires that would be impossible to ever fulfill, the missed opportunities and pereptual failures. I heard voices from downstairs having the same spirited discussion, and again and again I hear my name coming from downstairs, they’re talking about me, they know I fucked up, etc etc (I doubt anyone actually said my name once). I suddenly realize, what if someone else wants to use this bathroom? I decide to suffer in my existential crisis out in the hallway. People come upstairs and find me for the first time. Despite me saying I’m okay, they can tell something is wrong, and offer to bring me water. They are nothing but friendly, loving, accommodating. I feel sick, but this calms me down a bit.

T8:00- I go back downstairs for some awkward social interaction. My speech and language capabilities are still subpar, and I am having great difficulty explaining how I feel, what I just felt, and making conversation in general. My memory fails me as my thoughts jump and chain around, causing me to lose track of conversations mid-sentence. Visuals are dying down, but the perspective and size of the room still feels totally out of whack.

T8:30- More friendly, loving, caring interaction slowly pulls me out of the negative chains of thought. I am no longer meticulously and consciously thinking and wrangling every bit of stimulus and every action. My automatic thought returns and it’s a huge burden off my mind. My thoughts are no longer blossoming into toxic tendrils of negative possibilities and wicked pain and a bleak and hopeless future, they now blossom into warmth and considerations of a pleasant future and good things to come. The storm has passed, the sickness is over.

T10:00-I smoke more. Nothing to note, everything has calmed down, people are going to bed, I am still wired from the acid and stay up later. I feel confident, warm, happy, and energetic. I  thoroughly clean the house while everyone is sleeping just to make myself useful and make up for being an incoherent basket case most of the night.

T12:00-I lie down to sleep. Visuals are still slightly playing if I pay attention to them-a rippling of everything that looks like the waves of heat rising off a hot surface. I eventually fall asleep.