Introduction essay.
Just created this account a little while ago, mainly because I became interested in DMT while I was here visiting a cacti thread.
I'm not completely new to psychedelics, a while ago I grew and used mushrooms pretty heavily for a few months, it was really great up until I ran out of cubensis and decided to try some ALT#7 mushrooms that had failed to make truffles, I used bioassay feedback from other users to help gage the correct dose, but either they were mistaken or I miss calculated because what was suppose to be a medium dose turned into the deepest trip iv ever had, and it was so bad that iv completely given up mushrooms and may never touch them again. (ill post the trip report I wrote for shroomery at the end of the essay) after a while I read that cacti and mescaline were suppose to be a lot more gentle, so I decided to give that a try, haven't had my first trip yet, still collecting cacti and data mostly to get up the courage to go on a 12 hour cacti trip, at least with shrooms it was 4 hours the concept of a bad 12 hour trip has me putting it off each time I want to try, but I only plan on using extracted amount so it can be measured and hopefully a bad cacti trip is easier to handle. But while I was here reading some of the cacti threads I started reading a little about DMT, everything about it seemed interesting and seemed like something I should try at least once.
adventures with psilocybin, a bad trip and while I'll never use mushrooms again.
"This report is a bit overdue, by over a year. I'm also going to include a little back story and previous shrooms use as I believe it plays a role in why thing came out the way they did.
My use of mushroom started well, I originally planed on bulk growing truffles for my first experience due to having a large cheap supply of wild bird seed, suffice to say that never really went anywhere they just never seemed to grow for me, but upon receiving my order of Psilocybe galindoi spores I had also received a free sample syringe of cubensis so I figured I could try my hand of mushroom growing while the truffles took their 6-month growth period. I proceeded to grow out my first shrooms and used about 2 grams dried for my first try, dried in a dehydrator, ground into a powder and soaked in hot water with some herbal tea. The resulting trip had visuals and a bit disorienting but overall pleasant, the odd wavy pattern out of the corner of my eye and a heavy almost alcohol like looseness to my head and limbs.
My second trip was 2 weeks later, figuring that a 2-week period was sufficient to reduce any tolerance from the previous trip. This time I tripped with a tad bit over 3 grams, same preparation, same sensations as before but more intense, colors were almost neon, everything swayed and breathed, the curtains on my wall seem to form faces that smiled happily at me, I would have small involuntary twitches all over my body but pleasurable, I remember thinking I wanted to "go deeper" and try redoseing myself mid trip (didn’t seem to actually work) but I remember having about 2 grams of dried caps left, so I grabbed them, some water and my mortar and pestle. Dumping the caps in with some water, I began to mash it all up, I remember watching as the spores from the caps began to color the water and just staring as it did so, the water seemed to turn pitch black as if the mortar was filled with pure ink..and pretty much tasted like pure ink too. I spend the rest of the trip walking around both inside and outside just looking at all the pretty colors.
I continued to trip like this for the better part of 5 months, every 2 weeks. I had gotten to the point of using 5+ grams dry each trip. I had found that my favorite thing to do was dose myself and watch YouTube videos until it hit me, then turn off the lights, set a playlist of music, turn off the lights and sit in my computer chair with my legs pulled up while sitting in an almost fetal position sideways on my chair, I would just listen to music and watch the fireworks go off in my head.
It was at this 5 month mark that I decided to crack open one of my numerus jars of truffle spawn in order to harvest a few small truffles and case the remaining grain to eventually make spore prints, didn’t want to pay another $30+ for another syringe, however despite being 5 months into a 6 month growth period and what seemed like multiple large truffles growing on the inner glass of the jar I come to find no truffles and the things on the sides of the jars are just super flat paper thin truffles, I decide to just case the whole thing in a dish, I had also made a cake with the remaining 0.5ml of spores at the start of the whole thing so I opened that and cased that too (funny enough, my jars that have bird seed, and a few rye jars never grow any truffles but the tiny BRF cake did) I decided to grow out and save the mushrooms grown from the truffle spawn since they were reportedly potent.
After a while of harvesting, dehydrating and storing the galindoi mushrooms I finally used up the remainder of my cubensis, my bulk grow wasn’t ready yet so I decided to give the galindoi mushrooms a try. I had read in a few places that they were equal in potency to liberty caps (or something like that) I don’t remember the exact numbers of comparisons but since the dosage calculator did not offer info on galindoi mushrooms but did on the liberty caps I used the known potency of those to calculate the equivalent to cubensis…..apparently, I did it wrong.
I only used something like 1.2 grams, what I had calculated out as being a level 3 dose. Everything was the same as every other time, same setting, same prep, same activity, but about 40 minutes into the trip had just begun to kick in and at first things seemed to be going normally when suddenly something didn’t seem right, all of a sudden with no apparent reason or trigger everything felt wrong, no matter how much I tried to ignore this and find any happiness I just couldn’t, it just kept getting worst and worst as the trip began spiraling out of control, every minute that went by one second its going great then the next nothing I was watching was funny anymore, I didn’t feel happy, the next thing I know I just feel terrible, an nondescript feeling of bad, I figure I'll switch YouTube to something upbeat (not that I was watching anything heavy or depressing) but the trip got more intense, the color drained out of everything and my vision was replaced by everything being tinted yellow, my heart was racing, I was sweating, I felt emotional/mental pain that kept getting worst and worst to the point that it felt like physical pain, I felt nauseated and vomited a few times over the trip, each minute that went by the trip only got stronger, I couldn’t stand, I couldn’t handle looking at anything so I shut my room, turned off every light and laid in bed, only leaving for the occasional need to vomit outside, all I could do was lay in bed as the mushrooms were seemingly trying to kill me from the inside, the only thing that kept my mind off the unbearable sense of imminent doom and terror was to just keep breathing in and out and repeating over and over that I was alright, that everything was going to be ok, it was weird, on one hand part of me know that I was perfectly ok and safe, that I was just having a bad trip on an accidentally over high dose of shrooms, but the other side was spiraling out of control and trying to convince myself I was dying.
I've heard it mentioned that a bad trip is like being a prisoner of your own mind, a sentiment I agree with, because there was that part of me that knew what was going on and that it was nothing but being at the complete mercy of my own reaction and irrational spiral of fear.
What made it worst was that thought the whole ordeal my sense of time was distorted, second felt like hours, minutes felt like life times, every time I felt like the trip had to be coming to an end soon because I had been dealing with it for hours I would look up at the clock to see that it had only been 5 minutes. And not only was my sense of time messed up so was my sense of past, present and future. The past felt like it happed millions of years ago, it wasn’t me who drank the mushroom tea, it was someone else millennia ago, and there is no future, only the present and the present is forever, I'm going to be trapped like this in this single moment forever, I don’t know how else to describe it, the future just didn’t exist to me and by extension hope, hope that the unbearable torture I was trapped in would never end. All I could do was lay there in the dark, and except my fate of eternal torture and watch with closed eyes as Aztec esk geometric symbols blasted through my mind (I don’t know if it’s a brain wiring thing that cause said patterns or if it was my subconscious playing to what one would expect from a trip, there's a lot of psychedelic art that plays to that theme, is it because were wired to see such things or is it because the art conditioned us to expect such things and intern fuel more art of said design). And of course, the mushrooms weren’t done yet, at this point I was maybe 1.5-2 hours into the trip and was still getting stronger my the second, I felt as if my feet and hands cease to exist, then my legs and arms, my chest and head, all that was left was my conscious floating in a nothingness of terror, I remember seeing blue raindrop like streaking and white vibrating rings exploding from a central point. I remember trying to sit up, to try get some water or something in the hopes that maybe I could chug some sugar water to help flush the psilocybin from my system but upon wrestling my body back from the void and sitting up I was immediately hit with a whole other magnitude of all-encompassing emotional/mental/physical pain. I remember laying back down and surrendering back to the void, and just thinking over and over "I want it to end, I'll never do this again, I'll do anything to make this end…there's one way to make it end" my mine was flooding with thoughts that suicide would make it stop while arguing with myself that that was stupid, its just a shroom trip. I would have never actually done it but to mentally be so desperate to make it stop that the concept even comes up is painful.
I just laid in bed like this for the next 1.5 hours when suddenly in the blink of an eye, like someone snapped their finders everything stopped, my nausea ended, the visuals stopped, I suddenly had a body again, all the pain and torment had gone, the room was quiet, I reached over the turned on the light, my vision was clear but there was a slight bright fog over everything like I was looking through a supper fine mesh made of infinitely small rainbow particles too small to perceive but still being able to "know" that they are there..and rainbow.
It was at that point that "I" and "me" became "we", in this weird sudden period of clarity I felt my consciousness split into what felt like at least 4 people, there was no "I" anymore "we" shared a body, its weird having a conversation about yourself..with yourself..when there's at least 3 other yous. This lasted for maybe 40 minutes, when suddenly the rest of me were gone, I remember laying there and thinking "am I alone now?" this was the point that the trip had basically ended.
This was my first bad trip but not my last. After swearing that I would never touch shrooms again I gave it some time, I eventually decided to try once more at a minimal dose and back on the cubensis on a more familiar mushroom but over the next 3 mini trips each one was just a lite version of what I had gone through that night, obviously nowhere near that level but enough that after the third failed trip I tossed all my mushroom supplies and vowed to never touch shrooms again. I don’t know what caused the initial bad trip, weather it was something I was consciously carrying into the trip, weather there was something else to the truffle mushrooms or if it was simply a normal reaction to unexpectedly getting hit by 100x the expected strength of psilocybin. What I do know is that this one night has killed mushrooms for me, I don’t think I'll ever be able to pick of up and use it without bringing all the fear and pain from that night into every new trip.
I've tried to described it but words just can't convey how truly terrible that night was, it was the single worst thing I have ever lived though, and is not something I ever want to live though again. The good times were amazing but the bad times were soul shatteringly horrible, despite the horrible I can't quite bring myself to completely forget about the amazing, its not something I'm quite ready to completely give up on. A few months ago, I began growing cacti due to the belief that it a "gentler" psychedelic, were mushrooms are known for being brutal mescaline seems to have the description of being the more loving teacher. I haven't tried cacti yet despite having the raw material. Every time I get close to preparing to go for it I'm scared away by my past experience with mushrooms especially since mescaline lasts twice as long as psilocybin. When I do eventually get down too it I want to be safe about it, no raw cactus, only extract to a measurable form, and only a low or mid dosing."