As an aspiring author it has become a dream of mine to compile my own piece of literature that paints a portrait of the realms of psychedelia in my own way.
My vision is to include humor, metaphor, science, culture and fact in a book that aims more to intrigue and hypothesize about the nature of the universe through a psychedelic lens, than explain anything in a way that reaches traditional conclusions.
Past experience writing lengthy texts has led me to develop a write first-edit later approach to such things, but to give users here an idea of what I have in mind, think of the concept as a flowing story revolving around the lives and practices of those who use psychedelics and how their experiences affect their daily lives, perspectives and future choices.
The stories will shape a wider selection of narratives that culminate in painting a picture of “Western” for lack of a better term approach to exploring the unknown.
DMT will be the ultimate centerpiece of this, as I have yet to come across a more bizarre substance that has entrenched itself in human culture for so long and in such a resonant way despite it’s often very alien feeling.
How much of myself, my past dependence on addictive drugs and associated (chicken or the egg anyone?) mental health struggles both overcome and being overcome I will include is something that I am not sure of as of yet, but I will lean heavily on my own style of writing, and aim to portray the narrative through the set of lenses I wear when I find myself face to face with angels and demons, the singularity and the abyss, hyperspace and baseline.
Should this project take hold I aim to become a regular hangaround on the Nexus, mostly interested in the more unique trip reports and in talking both openly and privately with any users who may want to process an experience more by discussing it further. I believe that in our shared inalienable traits lies a desire to have one’s story told, and trying to describe what often remains off limits to the written word is to me a path one takes in order to enshrine these experiences into a new universal and international culture of psychedelics in the modern era. Not that I am hostile towards or dismissive of historical cultures and their use of psychedelics, but we psychonauts live on a frontier where we stare well past the earth and into the heart of the nature of existence itself.
I’m a writer and I feel like collaborating, I feel like interviewing, I feel like creating, I feel pretty good about myself.
Psychedelics are magical, and a journey, and I believe the same can be said about the right choice of written word.
With that being said, hey all, I’m LouSkywalker, you can call me Lou if you want because that’s not my real name. I’ve checked this place out, and it checked me out. I laughed and surprised myself by how much fun I had and how decisively creative I felt inventing and naming a color as part of the entry exam. I’m here to try and create art, and with that being said a dream of mine is to find someone who can one day visually portray a trip in the way I attempt to write about them, someone who’ll trade crafting me a visual artwork in exchange for a literary one.
But the universe is in no hurry. My experiences with spice are far from over, as are many of yours, and I’m not here to rush anything or declare myself king writer, just to perhaps run with this burst of inspiration for as long as it lasts.
I have posted this trip report on the Shroomery and on Erowid (I hope mentioning these other good resources is encouraged, apologies if this breaks policy). But the heart of it was DMT, not mushrooms, although it includes both as well as sceletium and cannabis. I am proud of this. Here it is, and I warn you it is 2500 words long... But I'm looking to write a book remember
*Note to reader, although the unedited original writing mentions changa, I later found out that it was 1:1 enhanced leaf. Not an MAOI infused or containing smoking blend, just DMT precipitated on some appropriate carrier herbs.
I’m a 90kg 180cm mid twenties male.
Background with the substances:
I am very familiar with psilocybin mushrooms, large doses even more so than light ones. I am however naturally tolerant to psychedelics, likely as a result of me being in the process of a “slower is safer” tapering off of clonazepam approach. However, I am tapering properly and as such I have no “off baseline” effects from benzos, but it probably does contribute to an increased tolerance to psychedelics.
DMT is somewhat of a treat, before last week I had only smoked DMT freebase properly once, and it didn’t belong to me so there was a limit to how far I could really go using just a glass cannabis pipe.
Changa is totally new to me, and early last week I was presented with some stellar quality 1:1 changa, and given a full gram to explore the realm with leisure.
I sampled it in ranges from 35ish to 120ish mgs on 2 occasions before last night, and definitely had fun, but nothing quite comparable to some of the so-called “DMT Breakthroughs” I have heard and read about, instead I would have described the effects as similar to peak intensity immediate onset psilocybin, basically “smokable psilocybin with a twist”.
*FAST FORWARD TO LAST NIGHT*
When getting my DMT I also came upon 5 grams of potent cubensis mushrooms. My source and I were having a chat and relaxing, and our conversation drifted towards our preferred way of taking mushrooms. Mine was the Lemon Tek, and his was to make little chocolates. This led to us agreeing that the surface area plays a huge role[he grinds them up with a coffee grinder], and since I planned to have the mushrooms that evening I asked him to put my 5 grams in a coffee grinder, expecting to get a weed grinder-like consistency and instead ending up with a small jar of dust-like powder.
I put off the trip as my mindset didn’t “feel right” for the following 3 evenings. I often do this,
keep mushrooms just to have them on hand for the right mindset.
Last night I was on/off about whether or not I would trip. My stomach was feeling bloated constantly. I had all of this stress and tension that I couldn’t let go of and it made me have a bit of a reserved feeling about tripping. I usually trip with a happy mindset, and I don’t get “bad trips” probably because of my taking care in this regard. However, I started asking myself if maybe my use as of late had become more recreational than spiritual, and I concluded that the answer was in fact a yes. I could then see things differently, and I realised that maybe a difficult trip was just what I needed to freshen up my synapses and once again touch that feeling of oneness.
Sceletium tortuosum, colloquially referred to as “bushman ecstasy” is native to South Africa where I am, and I had a vial of about 300mg of water soluble powdered extract. I normally don’t enjoy the powdered extract, as I’m already scatterbrained enough as it is and I find the effects to worsen concentration when taken nasally. For sober life, I prefer using a glycerin tincture sublingually. However, I had read good things about it in combination with natural psychedelics.
I poured my vial of sceletium powder onto my bathroom shelf and insufflated about a quarter of it after taking the mushrooms. I left it there in a pile in case I wanted more, but the rest ended up going to waste. Before dosing anything, I measured out roughly 120mg of changa and put it in the vial, then tucked it away in my bedside drawer.
At 8pm on the dot I added the 5 grams of mushroom powder to about 80 mls of lemon juice. From previous experiences I had deduced that [at least subjectively for me] the sweet spot was exactly 15 minutes. This may be speculation, but one theory of mine is that since psilocin oxidises rapidly, leaving the mixture any longer loses some of the immediacy. Since the shrooms were such a fine powder, I drank the mixture in one gulp after sitting it for 12 minutes.
The serotonin effect of the mushroom come-up was changed from a somewhat uncomfortable transition to a totally clear head and a feeling of relaxation and acceptance. Within 5 minutes I was laying down on my bed just enjoying looking at the moonlight peeking through my curtains with my headphones on at times and off at others.
I’m not sure how much the experience was influenced by the sceletium and how much was my own mind, but I would say that it was the most enjoyable come-up I’ve ever had. Everything unfolded slowly, and I didn’t experience any confusion. The first 20 minutes to 40 were spent with almost no typical psychedelic effects, but a massive feeling of peace and clarity. Indeed, for a substance that never lives up to the hyped up “bushman ecstasy” moniker, it actually kind of felt like mdma that time, but relaxing and without the upper feeling.
Once the mushrooms kicked in, they kicked in proper, and I enjoyed a few bong rips and a joint of some good bud. The visuals were more detailed and complex than I’d had in a long time, with psychedelic patterns being replaced by complex transcendental visions of cosmic machinery. I felt like I was travelling, it had a very “astral” feeling to it, like I was observing a usually hidden aspect of the universe.
As with many psychedelic experiences, a lot of it was indescribable, but those familiar with high doses of psychedelics [or just those familiar with DMT generally] can probably get a feel for what I was going through… Everything and nothing. A million questions being asked and answered only to branch off creating exponentially more complex questions, some with answers and others where the mere concept of an “answer” and trying to rationalise one would be paradoxical.
The whole time I was feeling great, full of amazement and joy, and after about 1h15m I found myself sitting up and smiling, packing a bowl of weed. I stopped and assessed where in the experience I was, and concluded that although I was still tripping very hard, the peak was past, and the effects were now at the plateau.
I would have been perfectly happy with the trip as is, but I was simultaneously very confident in my ability to handle something more. I picked the buds out of my bong and left only the tiniest piece of already singed weed to cover the bottom hole. I lit the half smoked joint I had and waited for a nice ball of ash to accumulate, which I tipped into the bong and flattened just a bit, making a little bed for the changa.
I struggled a bit to make sure it was all in there, but eventually I did without spilling. I wished in the moment that I had something other than tobacco or weed to cover it, thinking of the jar of sacred blue lotus petals I had somewhere, but I was glued to the bed and decided to just hit it with the lighter very far away. I pulled and pulled, doing a very good job of vaping the changa. I knew I was because fresh and vivid visuals were appearing before any burnt taste, but sadly I only had so much lung capacity, and halfway through I figured it better to get a large hit than a weak yet efficient one, so I pulled harder and got all of it going, running out of breath just as it finished.
I felt like I was being pulled in every direction by unknown forces, and I had to actually place my hand flat on the ground to make sure it was the ground before putting down the bong, I was just there for long enough to make sure I didn’t make a loud noise and break my it, which would have sucked by itself but also might have caused someone to check on me [I live with family who are okay with this, but I hadn’t told them I was tripping because they tend to worry that I do it too much/alone. They don’t really understand that I use these more spiritually and healing than recreationally]. Luckily I put it down, sat up and lay back like a champ.
I held my breath as long as possible, lifting my diaphragm to suck even more air in, eventually letting out the hit little by little. At first I was still where I had been, which was a dark and colorful room, but it changed in front of my eyes rapidly, expanding in size and the proportions of everything changing. I closed my eyes and felt all around the bed, touching pillows and blankets, whilst my mind started to play a movie. I experienced 2 things at once here.
Firstly, I had huge tactile awareness and could feel objects morph and change in size at a rapid pace. This was intense to the point where at the peak of this part, I was a fractal, an organic piece of flesh merging into a piece of psychedelia. I was quite literally the moving art I had been experiencing. I could physically feel all of it, but to describe the sensations would be impossible.
Secondly, the “movie” in my mind had just as much of my attention. The characteristic DMT visuals, which are similar to high dose mushrooms in ways to me, essentially barged in and took control of the party so to speak. The mushroom visuals played up and became even more beautiful versions of themselves, like they were competing with DMT, but almost like how a much younger brother looks at an elder sibling, trying to compete out of admiration but just not as old and wise as the other. I saw and felt a sort of warp speed journey through the underground, picturing tree roots and complex fungal networks interacting with each other in symbiosis. What was left of my ego sat in awe at how shallow my thinking had been [I later concluded that it wasn’t “shallow thinking” just practical real-world normal thinking, but nonetheless my normal human perspective seemed infinitely naive at the time] about what this experience would be like. I remembered the word “potentiation” from an earlier conversation and laughed at the word. It felt more like the 2 molecules were family, which in a sense isn’t even wrong, but literally connected through a shared ability to transcend dimensions. It played out with an almost “movie trailer” feeling, and the visuals danced together, morphing into a hybrid that had the intensity of DMT but the longer, slower feel of mushrooms too.
That’s when I pretty much went out of body, not in a sense that I didn’t know what was happening, but in a sense that my physical body was no longer in a dimension relevant to my current perspective. I knew I was there, but the concept of “I” had yet to reappear. I found myself just watching and feeling all of this, and suddenly it clicked, like a moment of singularity, and I could observe myself as just a human. A unique and complex being, yes, but just another human, my perspective was completely devoid of personal input. I saw that nature was everything, and that the universe was nature. Everything was nothing and that statement was a logical view despite the contradiction. I realized that what we call the universe is the same as reality, the same as nature, the same as God, the same as life and death as one, and most touchingly the same as the self.
For ease of explanation I’ll name this next part of the experience “the message”, as my journey felt like I was receiving information directly from nature and the universe.
Observation was key to the manifestation of reality. Without the observer, the message was lost, and without the message, the observer was lost.
Reality manifested itself everywhere, and was observed on multiple planes. Desert planets were observed in one way or another, be it through life forms that exist as part of the collective consciousness on physical or transcendental planes, whilst life on earth observed itself.
This singularity feeling culminated in me feeling that at that point, I was the universe itself expressed as a single point that transcended the concepts of time and space, and the universe itself at that time had decided, whether through some interdimensional conscious process or a bending of its own flexible states of being. The universe was all powerful in its ability to express itself in any way it chose, and it chose to express itself in every way, all the time, simultaneously and sequentially.
I was the universe. And the universe at that point[read the above for what I mean by “point”] was an observer being shown an expression of pure beauty.
As this all happened and eventually died down in intensity, I was back to tripping on mushrooms in a more grounded way, but DMT had hijacked the flavor of the trip, and instead of fading the effects started a second wave. This time the trip was back to a rising peak for what felt like a short yet amazing period, then it came down again slowly, and I feel like the timeline was as such:
-Come-up, totally relaxed
-Rising mushroom peak, intense experience.
-Short plateau
-Obliterated in 5 ways at once from the hit
-Start of a new rise, made me hazard a guess that ayahuasca might be similar, but I wouldn’t know
-Intense peak of the experience much like another shroom peak.
-New plateau with DMT feeling predominant.
That about covers it, nothing special happened then other than a huge amount of beauty and fun. I had trippy thoughts and as I became more lucid I started to write some of this. It was a lot more visual at the end than a normal afterglow, and I spent 2 or 3 hours writing, thinking, reading and all of my stress and bloated-ness, the physical tension in my body was leaving. I once again connected strongly with the sense of universal oneness and eternity that my first recent trips had felt like, the only difference being that many of my thoughts felt far less personal and earthly than I would have on just mushrooms.
I hope you enjoyed that as a trip report, and if you'd like to see a writer take a crack at fleshing out a bizarre and hopefully profoundly deep experience, let's become friends. I have a bunch but I could use some.