My experience is summarized here, so many details I can not well explain.

When I was 22, I had the climax of many mushroom, LSD experiences with my absolute most trusted and best friend at the time and one other guy, who was not well known to me and in my sense at the time, was a dark presence. Powerful.

We had taken quite a bit of acid and were playing darts, then as it sunk in, I got very nervous, anxious, began shaking and starting taking everything the other two said as a personal attack on me. Just prior to the trip, they went in my roommates bedroom and were leaning over his bed, he didn't wake up until they were gone the next day and we played loud music and wer loud ourselves the entire night. I don't know what they did to him, if anything, but that was odd that he slept through it all.

The proceeding 12 hours was about me eventually praying for safety while I imagined that my supposed best friend, who I now was seeing as the devils' helper, and the other guy, whom I saw as the devil, were constantly asking me to join them and I wouldn't. I shook the entire night, felt cold even though it was summer and sipped water from a bowl I was holding. I kept asking them "what?" as they would look at me with grins on their faces. I had no idea what was occurring, but I felt as thought they could kill me or wanted to at any moment.

I have never taken LSD after that. The next day after that trip, my former best friend said before leaving my college house, "this was not real, nothing you saw or heard was real, remember this was all an illusion.".

I felt clearly that they'd drawn me into the experience and wanted me to sacrifice myself on some level and that they were reveling in my struggle.

I recently, though I haven't taken anything but MDMA in the last few years or even since I was 22, had the same experience but in a much different way and this time, something took possession of me. My experience is very similar to one described by Botanical Bliss, but the difference for me, which just happened this past weekend in the mountains, was that I felt like or experienced the other five guys I was with actually establishing and forming the ceremony or ritual of sorts to make my possession occur. Aftward, one of them told me that they thought I was. During the "possession" experience around the fire the previous night, I could feel, without anything being said, as if they were all just waiting for me to break down and allow the possession and there was a distinct moment, when one friend put a stick on the fire and I saw a diagram, much like a star/pentagram, when then drew me in, the shrooms and molly I had taken literally absorbed me, the fire absorbed me and then some force took over, infused in in my body by this energy at once. When I lifted my eyes and looked up, it was if they all could exhale and they began to finally move around a little, as if the event has occurred so now we can test it.

They would ask me what was wrong, was I alright? I said no, my intention was to find enjoyment and I wasn't enjoying it, I felt very outside of them and expressed this. When they said things to comfort me, I couldn't believe them.

One guy said the next day he thought I was going to kill myself. I did not say so at the time, but that is what I felt the night before, as if they had possessed me with this demonic/alien spirit, and were waiting for all the negative self talk and my fear of never being able to come out of it, or go back to my life normally again, to take such a toll that I just ended it right there in front of them. It was coming back to me, the trip on acid I'd had many years before, and the commonality of me feeling the sense that there was an expectation that I would do something harmful to myself.

It was the worst of all to feel as if those two guys who I have trusted so deeply in the last 6 years, would be doing anything near the realm of what I was imagining they were doing.

I don't blame them, I'm explaining simply from my mushroom induced state, what I believed was happening at the time. When I told them the next day, they did think I was possessed but couldn't believe I was even asking them for assurance they had no part of it.

It's challenging to sort out truth from my delusional trip, one of the worst I've ever had, except for the one I had 22 years earlier, at 22.

Today, I now am reading some similar experiences on here and also coming to the realization that whatever it was that truly happened, whether it was others inducing the possession or myself imagining the entire episode, I feel honored by the experience. I feel stronger in the experience, as if I've gone to a dark depth of my own misunderstood soul and astral realms that I obviously was ready to handle, because the experienced was offered to me.

I do not really believe I was kicking the idea of being possessed around in my head before I took the trip, nothing could have been further from my conscious mind, I simply wanted to be feeling a state of bliss, with the connection to my two very good, and three other newer friends. It was sad for me in the experience to be thinking they were out to get me, have me taken by a spirit/demon/alien and do something damaging to my self... that was and still is very difficult to reconcile in my mind.

(I'm rambling this out a bit, sorry for the lack of structure) There was also near the end of the night, a stew being made by a guy who was doing mushrooms for the first time. He seemed to be a big part of the process, in my twisted mind experience. Like he would make a comment that tapped into my paranoid/schizo experience of possession I was having, and everyone would then acknowledge that I was still "possessed" or "still hot" they would say. I have no idea whether any of that actually happened or if it was just my hallucination.

I looked up in the sky and saw colored stars and many diagrams in the sky, I felt safer looking at the sky but it was so cold I couldn't lay down on my sleeping bag and be so cold, I couldn't move away from the fire.

It seemed every guy had a part to do, something to contribute and that I was becoming more useless as the night drew on. I imagined I could never be friends again with them, knowing this experience, and that they wouldn't want to be friends anymore, which is a part of death itself in that they are my closest friends and confidants. I had imagine that my whole life was going to change and that I would get locked into this possessive state of downward spiraling (mentally) that I was in, and never get out... but something in me was strong enough to stay in that fire all night and withstand it.

This was a deeper and much more powerful trip than I'd ever had and at one point, when a big blunt of weed laced with hash was passed around, it kicked the whole thing into a deeper setting. The music was a major driver in the mood of the group and the "process" that I was imagining was taking place.

It was if almost everything I heard the other guys say, was understood by all of them, and I was not a part of, that each thing they said had to do with the process of my possession and where I was in the process and them reveling in the fact that it worked and they had watched me go from fit, healthy strong man, to a literally possession/transformation or shape-shifting as one guy called it, into an old man, wise but frightened, in an un-trusting place, like I was back in the old west, in a bar with my back against the wall, and two loaded guns at my side... I didn't feel like that, but I did feel shriveled and old, scared and I was shaking uncontrollably the whole night. Another guy said he saw everyone as a light being and then I was like a black hole/spot. I felt like that, the black spot, the one who was not a part of things.

I did experience visuals, especially while looking into the fire, or allowing the music to do it's thing, which could take me away easily and quickly, but the underlying experience was dark, reminiscent of the one I'd had exactly at the halfway point in my life, almost to the day at 22 in college, now 44.

So I ask any other this: have you had an experience like this with friends? If so, how did you reconcile that when connecting with those people after the experience, especially if you were the only one who felt possessed and they were either witness or a part of making that happen (if so)?

I now see it all as a blessing. There is so much for me to uncover and learn about myself in the way that I could be among loving people and go to such a dark and closed off, un-trusting space around them. I do think it had something to do with tripping around 3 guys I didn't really know very well.

If you have any insight to share or offer, I would love to hear it. Btw, early in my late teens into the age of 22, I had done copious amounts of LSD, hash, smoked weed constantly, and took many different kinds of mushrooms many times with different friends.

Thanks!

yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Jin, ??? yesssssss, means what exactly? Thanks!

just kidding brother

yesss is basicly my way to express my excitement

do you really believe in the possession or do you think it can be paranoia and excessive thinking

i mean what if you did'nt know about possession , what if this particular word was never taught to you , would you still define it this way

i can't believe other nexians are not posting considering this is so exciting

i have a relevant tale of possesion i could share yet you know deep down i really don't believe it , however my friend seems to have suffered when such a thing happened on our LSD trips , yet i refuse to believe in it discarding it as paranoia and excessive thinking over nothing

edit :in retrospect things like this and things far weirder like total death and rebirth , understanding the transformation , eternal existence , existing in various diemensions at once , living each and every life , looking out from each and every eye , seeing everything to and beyond ,being the whole cosmos to what not has already happened to me

yet it can be my excessive thinking too , eitherways i guess there is nothing to worry about , after all its all good in the universe ,

also if you look at the way society is functioning you would know they are all possessed , possessed by a demon called thought , atleast you know there is something possessing you , getting rid of it is the only answer then

possession is easy , people get easily possessed by anger,greed,crazyness and also good things like joy and what not

so what happened to you was real , yet things like this are not new , this has been happening all the time , the choice is yours whether you allow yourself to be possesed or not or you can also choose Total Clarity instead

Hi JMan - I want to thank you for having the courage to post this thread, I know it couldn't have been easy to 'come out' with such an experience, even in the midst of a collective such as this one, where 'weird' is the 'norm'...

I am not in the position to post all I want to say on this topic ATM, time constrains me and also my physical location inhibits my ability to be as candid and forthcoming about my own experiences as I would like to be. I have had several very very similar episodes over the course of my 20+ year career using psychedelics and when I am better able I will return to this thread to share some of my own 'trip', which parallels yours in many ways, and seek for some sort of consensus... or at least a tangential commonality. It would be comforting to hear others have shared similar incidence. It is uncanny...

Reading this, I could so easily identify with your fears and confusion, and I want to say my heart goes out to you and I hope that more members here will chime in...this site is the top of the food chain IMHO and we're fortunate to have such a milieu to bring these issues - so hopefully some of the more seasoned vets here will bring their own wisdom to bear on this and perhaps together work to assuage some of your difficulties.

I like much of what Jin says in describing 'possession' - a succinct breakdown of how easily the word can be tossed around and how many ways it can be accurately applied. Yet, for our intents and purposes concerning this particular thread, I believe that you are NOT confused as to what 'kind' of possession you experienced: clearly, you remarked more than once, calling it 'demon' and/or 'alien' [which I believe are interchangeable here]

What a terrifying place to be! 'Real' or not is completely academic, especially while under the influence, and then the retrospective fuzz of trying to sort out such powerful feelings, and why they happened and what on earth do they mean etc...it is a conundrum.

Point blank, I believe without any shred of doubt that 'real' demonic [non human, malevolent, autonomous agencies] DO - in fact - exist in our everyday ordinary world, and that these are largely unseen/unacknowledged because of the myriad distractions afforded [or rather, imposed upon] us in the Western paradigm...interestingly - this characteristic of being 'hidden in plain sight' (to me) lends an authenticity to these entities' legitimacy: and here I must digress somewhat lest the conspiracy train wrecks the thread.

However, in any case, this idea of possession should not be doused with ridicule or dismissed out of hand simply because of the vocational parlance or religious vernacular so commonly associated with it. I think it is all too often the case - when notions of possession are brought to the forefront of conversation, that there seems to be an almost intrinsic embarrassment which stymies reasonable dialogue because the term is steeped in preconceived notions and prejudice - and people fear getting into religious debate or are turned off automatically because dogmatic ideology is invoked. Putting aside denominational or papal association, possession can [and if you research it, you will find it often does] apprehend even the most stalwart secular personalities among us, and here again: I find the irony to be almost a 'proof' lending credence to such an irrational, unorthodox manifestation...this is to say, while many if not most - spiritual practices and disciplines - require that one truly believe in the ideologies and prerogatives that comprise their systems: faith in possession is not prerequisite to falling 'victim' to the phenomenon, nor indeed to have any experience of or with it at all. This always struck me as some expression of the verisimilitude of possession and states of possession - whether subjective experience or objective [albeit stunned] observation...

It sometimes 'feels' as if - on the one hand, this specter is wholly accepted among our confederates - yet there's seemingly a reluctance to discuss the matter 'too deeply', at least in public. Even on a forum such as this...I have seen great threads similar to this one on other popular boards - and watched as the subject was basically tiptoed around or surreptitiously ignored... to me this in itself beggars serious questions, and could easily be construed as a red flag of sorts, or assimilated into the bottomless neurosis of paranoia...

Anyway, thanks for sharing and putting this out there, and kudos on handling the situation so well - it is times like these that make for the ole Epic Fail - so I think you did it like a champ. No matter what one believes, it shouldn't be a stretch for anybody to see that this is serious stuff [especially if it happens to YOU] and 'real' or 'hallucination', the matter is not one to be casually brushed aside.

I hope to see other's own experiences and ideas about this bizarre artifact.

I look forward to revisiting this to share a few uncomfortably mind-boggling episodes of my own... If nothing else, maybe we can sooth one another's insanitism.

I am sorry you had to go through this as it seems something very intense in a negative way. Like posted above I do think you have handled it with great maturity, talking about it with your friends and being honest about it. I would also advise to keep talking about it with them.

What I am wondering is how you felt before the trip? In what kind of mind set were you? I can imagine that the experience you have had 22 years before would still be present. Do you think that played some kind of role in this? Do you ever feel this kind of paranoia in your day to day life?

I don't want to be rude or anything, but have you ever had mental problems or maybe in the family? The fact that you consider this experience as a gift and a lesson to learn from is very valuable.

Every single person is going through similar energy changes every day without even knowing it.The trip exaggerated it for you although some are more susceptible than others.The darker energy is more akin to your primitive side but through indoctrination from childhood you saw it as possession and that what it was for you.Over come the fear by accepting it and you will get past it
Taking hits of LSD or mushrooms with strangers is not recommended that guy made you feel alone and paranoid I would say because of who he was.You will find that a person like that was most likely very insecure and could mask it by being tough and dominant..My motto is if it dosent kill you it can only make you stronger ,go off into the wilderness alone or with people you know and trust and enjoy nature and have a very positive experience.Dont forget your mobile fone though and mp3 player with the best trance music you can find...lol

although wee live in the subconscious our pale reason hides the infinite from us

what would be interesting is if you try tripping alone and observe whether you're still getting possessed ?

if not it could be friends around you are causing you excessive stress and thus weakining your spirit causing it further detioration which allows for possession

until your spirit becomes weak such possession cannot happen ,

it can be your friend is carrying a monster on his back and then simply unloads it on you

be safe , trip alone

edit : enveloping yourself in a bubble of total clarity can help you from getting possessed ever and it can also help you unload the monster on your back , if there is one attached to you

just search for threads where i have been talking about breath and sound concentration techniques , these techniques smash monsters like flies

I am sorry Jin, but I don't think this is very good advice in this case. I believe quite the opposite would be the first step to take. Try finding a shaman with a lot of experience and joining a ceremony with that person. I say this because I have seen what this can mean for participants having a rough time.

If you would trip alone and you would feel the same, it would be worse as there is no one to turn to and no one to help. An experienced shaman would know what to do and could help in this situation and he could also recognize a monster on your back and if he is really good chase it away.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against tripping alone, but in this circumstance it doesn't seem like the right thing to do.

Uh huh. Find a "shaman". Right. Just go done to the Home Depot, aisle 22, and there's your shaman. Or maybe Craigslist? What is a "shaman", anyways? Most of us have lots more experience than those who would call themselves a shaman. And with more substances and circumstances.

And, funny enough, the only minor troubles I've had on mushrooms are when others are present. Alone works best, but that's just for me.

wow, this is a really great thread. very bold to post an experience like this, thanks for that. so much I want to say, but honestly, i think many great things have been said, so I will likely just tap out and just chime in to say I think tripping alone can be a great thing. I have had some of my best experiences after BTs just working through things alone some time soon after.

I think the OP stated clearly that he hadn't done psychedelics in 22 years since he had a negative lsd trip. So stating that he would be more experienced is just crazy. I believe that with some research you can find a shaman who has experience and has had some kind of training. It is not so uncommon for even westerners to have had this kind of training. Tripping alone might work best for you, I am just not so sure this is the best for the OP.

Another thing, mushrooms have such a long history that we seem to forget all too easily in the West. For thousands of years they have been used and always in a group setting. I think this has its reasons. And for us westerners to just disregard this is plain dumb.

Again, I am not saying tripping alone is bad, I have done so myself as well, but in this case I really do not believe sending someone in the situation of the OP into the desert to trip alone is the best thing. I think it is irresponsible and it could get worse. It is important to know about his mindset before he went into this journey as I asked in my first post.

If you don't like the term shaman, that's fine call it what you like. I am just suggesting that the OP should try to find someone who has experience with this kind of thing and who know s how to handle these situations.

if you don't trip alone , becoming comfortable with yourself can be a difficult thing in the long run

you'll get so used to how you're around people that you might mistakenly assume that is who you are

also did'nt Terannce Mckenna also recommend tripping alone

Since when is McKenna's word THE way to go? I love McKenna, but I don't take his word for truth. Plus he said those words in a completely different context.

Anyway, I'm not saying tripping alone is bad, on the contrary it can be very beneficial, but I don't think that everyone can solve their problems on their own. On top of that when you take part in such a ceremony you are also left to yourself in the sense that it is dark. You normally do not talk to anyone else, with the difference that IF something should go wrong or if you would need the help, someone with experience would be there to intervene and guide you.

I am very grateful for the responses and the inherent integrity of the posters on this forum is clear to me. Thank you.

I have been contemplating this journey I had many many times over now, even have met individually with a few of the men I was with on the trip, one of whom was a man I'd not spent much time around and who (in my tripping state) had assumed was the one leading the possession.

It was a very interesting meal. I even felt, still, a slight shimmer of the experience that was happening that night, that I was speaking a language different from the one the others were speaking in that they understood their conversation one way, and I another way. That night I had interpreted that once I felt the "possession" of sorts, they then had dialogue that was cued to that, at many points remarking that it was still hot... which in my tripping state with the possession story I had going, I interpreted as them meaning to discuss how rich my "possession" was and whether it had "took" or had taken hold. It was crazy to me, in that I had not gone into the evening at all thinking about this type of thing, or even thinking about being on the outside so much as I had felt during the trip.

I did have anxiety about the trip, and brought along the molly, as my very good friend had also, to keep the trip from going too dark (if it went that route). Again, I was acting out of the past experience that mushrooms and acid ended up leading me into some dark territory that I, once face to face with it, decided not to enter.

However, the mushrooms this past time, had taken hold themselves so strongly that I forgot to take the molly until I was really full into the trip, it had little effect really accept to bring a reminiscent euphoria up intermittently with certain music I knew.

What's really challenging now, is that even after talking with and being around a few of the guys I was with, there was really nothing proactive from them around how I was doing with the experience. The last one I met with, who I do not know that well, said nothing of the experience. I said nothing, as I did not and do not really have any deep trust in him. The ones I do trust implicitly, I have discussed it with. Mostly, I have worked on this experience and how it might relate to my trips years ago, my mindset before and the causal effects of those anxieties which I brought INto the trip, which I'm sure did not help.

I went to such an extremely outcast place that night, though, such a mentally dark place, that isn't even akin with my level of thought of myself on a regualar basis, it was really shocking. With some distance now, it really does seem to me that something else was telling me to think so poorly of myself, as before and since, I think very highly of myself, my spiritual developments and all that I've practiced and studied over the years to deepen the self-realization process.

I took the mushrooms in that situation partly because I knew how strong and solid my soul-center was/is now, and how after losing everything in my life and now thriving back to a place that is the manifestation of a true warrior in modern respects, I could not ever fall victim to anything more powerful than the force that runs through me in the now... I knew this, and yet, something encroached heavily on my soul and mind that night, as if to attempt to push me back to a weak and self-deprecating mentality that I surely DID have for many years after the last LSD experience. It took me many years to unravel the inner shaking from that LSD trip that sent me believing that no one could be trusted, and/or that I would find out that anyone I really did trust, would turn out to be evil.

No, Elpo, although I have seen and worked with many therapists and psychologists over the years for different things, and even though I've shared openly with all of them my experiences on psychedelics, especially the bad trips to see what was there for me to strengthen or examine, I've not had anyone tell me I was mentally ill. I don't snap into odd mental states in non-tripping states, like daily or anything. I have felt uncomfortable socially at times, like I would rather be silent than talking about things that seemed to not really matter. I do not tolerate parties very long anymore, I loved them when I was younger, but now I prefer intimate, quieter and meaningful connection. I have plenty of fun and craziness, but not partying like when I was young. So, I don't know how much of my mentality would be attributed to a mental illness. Nothing runs in my family history either.

Like the LSD trip, it's the odd relation to those involved afterward that made if so difficult to just accept as an illusion of my own mind. This time is somewhat similar in that a few of the people who I was imagining were behind the whole 'possession' ceremony that I was experiencing, having seen them afterward, and the level of distance there, is just really odd. I can't stand here and blame anyone, it's my own experience and they may just be acting out of the uncomfortableness of having witnessed me going into such a dark trip that they just don't feel any desire to connect now at all, on any level, but I've seen all three of the guys since, not long after in fact, and the experience was very odd.

Now, I'm on a tangent in more personally relative experiences of a more psychological nature, but I do see everything as part of the same thing, all connected and this experience as a human being here, with access to such transports as drugs and psychedelics, is leading to good all the time.

The deeper learning here so far is that in that trip, love was attempting to fill me, but my reaction to the love trying to fill me up was to reject it. Now, I have had experiences in the last few years on mdma/molly where I felt more amazing than I've ever felt in a non-rolling state, and that is a completely different level of experience physiologically, I get that, however the depth of the negative self-talk in this recent mushroom trip was not at all where my current mindset is around myself. It's been many years since I recall having such horribly detrimental thoughts about myself.

I've had doubts and whatnot here and there, however minimal, and mostly the life experience I've had in the last four or five years has been one of total ascension, on the inner place, without any drugs to incite that ascension. Here and there, the molly has been a really fun place to go, but from my deeper soulful experience of meditation and moving practices (i.e. moving through life while unattached to everything, good or bad, etc.) I've felt and realized through expression in the physical, what bliss for me is really about.

This is nothing like what suddenly happened that night, and why it was so disturbing while it was happening, even more that I had a seemingly other logical brain, analyzing the whole the thing while it was happening and commenting on it in a way.

A few things from that night, in relation to others that were there still don't sit well with me:
- as I reflect on it, and maybe it's only thoughts, because I can't say exactly what I would have done, but looking back, it's a bit shocking that no one did much more than chat with me for a few minutes during the night, or ask how I was doing from time to time. When I answered that I felt really outside of everyone, like everyone was getting the conversation but me, there was an odd silence. I remember feeling shitty that night in those moments for being the guy having a bad trip and interrupting what seemed like a pretty good time for the others. I had guilt for being on a shitty plane while they were not. But, looking at it in hindsight, I may have taken a more active role if one of my good buddy's there was going into such a dark corner. Certainly, if I was thinking he was going to kill himself that night, I would have done anything I could to bring him into a more loved state. I felt a bit abandoned even by my best friends there, and that's really hard to type out here, really hard, because I want to believe they would not have let me sink without fighting to help me back; one said the next day, rather matter of fact, "I thought you were going to kill yourself"; during that night, it felt like they were wanting me to do that, but I did not feel even close to that idea. There are times in my life that have led me to feel suicidal, due to losses, but that night the thought of ending my life, which I now feel has more value than I've ever felt it has, was not even on my own mental radar - it seemed that night, that the thought of that was being impressed into my thoughts, or my mind from outside me, not naturally... (this probably makes no sense)

- some of the guys that were there, who never reach out to get together with me, suddenly wanted to meet up the next week. but then there was no talk of that night.

**look, if I'm trending this thread in a direction too far off from this site's objective, I get that, so my apologies for the depth of my tangents.**

- some of my friends, when I did bring up the night, told me that they have had experiences with me in the past where I seem to have checked out socially while we are in a group setting together, or that I get quiet. Very true.

-last: with all that I've read on witchcraft, satanism and occult belief and such, and with some experiences in my past, like I had at burning man and elsewhere, on LSD, Mescaline, Mushrooms, Hash, it was ironic (in a black humor kind of way) that there I was, seemingly the subject of the type of curse ceremony or spell casting I'd just recently read about (as detailed by LaVey in his bible). It was as if I knew the play, was in the play, but such a force had come over me during the play that I had neither the tongue nor the wit in the moment to share with anyone that I had a secret viewing pane of the experience, one that allowed me to remain unharmed spiritually, but that caused my physical appearance to wreak of the havoc (that I believed was being caused). So, my understanding of such an event, even IF I had unwittingly stumbled upon such a thing, would have rendered it less effective? I can neither judge that nor can I intelligently speak on it, really, as I am not a professed Satanist or witch of any sort. My limited understanding of it, though, just to play out the whole thing, is that if I was, let's say, cursed or possessed by a force that night... if it didn't kill me, it's highly possible (and LaVey had put forth in the instructions for this type of thing that...) the subject of one's curse, if the effects did not cause their death, could also have the polar opposite effect and that the subject would then come to grow and become a better, more valuable person to the world by overcoming whatever the 'negative' was that compelled (the Satanist, as I had read it) to cast that spell on them in the first place. During the bad LSD trip 22 years ago, where I had believed my best friend and his buddy to be Satanic and revealing their belief in such, asking me to join them (which I rejected at the time), I knew nothing of this belief system. It is what gave me the idea to research it, as prior to that I'd studied none of it. At the time of that trip, I was still terrified of dying. This last mushroom experience, found me at a time in my life, where I feel so fulfilled as a man and all I've done to develop myself and give of my self to those I move love, my children, that I could die right now, a satisfied human being. I am not remotely afraid of death now, as I don't really see there is anything other than a loss of the human clothes, so to speak.

Again, I am grateful for the interest and sharing of your own insights, advice and helpful thoughts about how I may go about understanding myself and my own darkness/demons that I may need to "shed from my back" or exorcise in some fashion and I've thought back and forth many times about tripping alone in a setting that I felt 100% safe in, as that definitely played into this particular trip. I have also thought of facing whatever the dark experience was head on, and going right back out, preferably with the same group of guys and in a similar setting, but now with the understanding of how I may have contributed to this last experience with my anxiety, approach it with the mental prowess I know I have in me from years of inner development, and if I started to go dark, simply work with myself as I know to do, and bring myself back to love. This last experience has not at all had the devastating effect that the bad LSD trip had on my 22 years ago (which took me many years to uninstall).

I did have some smaller amounts of powdered mushrooms, actually the same ones we took on this stated journey, but I had taken a much smaller amount, maybe a gram, one night and just played guitar and I had such an incredible feeling of bliss for a while as it waved through me, at home, alone on the couch singing and playing. Of course, I'm in my element there. This last time, I was freezing my balls off if I moved a foot away from the fire we had going. Completely frozen and shaking all night so it was an uncomfortable trip physically because of the cold environment.

For those who have said that you have similar experiences please share them as it may help us both to take a different look at how to view the experience and if there's new understanding available, it will facilitate a higher sense of things.

I would like to trip mushrooms again but not in that environment or with anyone I don't really feel close to, at least not right now. I've had great experiences in the past with taking a smaller amount of mushrooms and then an hour later, hippy flipping, but I'd like the deeper experience now of just the mushrooms, provided I can create an environment for myself that feels right.

Of course after all of this conjecture, it may be simply as many have stated, that my mindset was so off before I tripped that it caused whatever wild experience to take hold. That played a big role for sure, as I was very nervous going into it, not knowing with a heavy dose of shrooms, where I would possibly end up (given the last hard trip), so the anxiety about that was there. I may have just experienced the consequences of going against my own gut instinct, in trip form.

However, this forum and all the mind threads that are spinning from and through it, to me is exemplary of who we are in the now and why we are here, to more deeply understand our experience, or tell someone they're full of shit, or to F off or whatever it is the dialogue brings to surface.

If you feel I've overstated/stayed my welcome around this issue, so be it. If you have something to throw back that may expose an area of growth for me, or yourself or both, I'm interested.

I like the idea of tripping again on mushrooms myself and seeing what paranoia or anxiety attempts to find it's way into my trip. I have a hard time thinking about where I would do that, as my wife is rarely not home overnight, and is not a proponent of more drug use on my part, although if I felt I really wanted to, she would support me doing that myself.

When you (any of you) have tripped alone, where did you most enjoy the experience??

First let me say I feel for you for having to go through this experience.

I don't know exactly what happened, but my guess is you were probably freaking out and got a little delusional. I've had it happen to me where I was certain there were some very strange things going on and luckily I had someone there who was sober to help calm me down. Even with some one there talking sense to me I was still certain these things were happening. It wasnt until a few days later I excepted that it was all in my head.

I've also had a friend who I helped get some LSD who was convinced I had poisoned him after he took it. The whole thing was very strange he called about two or three hours after I left his house saying his water was green and asking me if I thought it was safe to drink it. I told him if it hadn't been sitting out for a long time and started growing mold on it or something he was just tripping and it was probably fine. I didn't hear back from him for a long time after this. He wouldn't answer my calls, if I ran into him he always had this deer in the head lights look like oh he caught me, he would maybe say hi then walk away really quick. This is someone I had known for years we used to play in a band together a week or so before that we had went camping and tripped together. About a year later he called me and told me that he had thought I poisoned him. He had been drinking with another friend of ours who we also played music with who told him that it was crazy and that'd I'd never do something like that. Now I realize this doesn't have much at all to do with your experience, but the reason your friends might act strange around you is its pretty off putting to have a good friend of yours tell you they think that you poisoned them and I'm sure having someone tell you they think you tried to cause them to become possessed would also be pretty off putting. When I talked to him later in person telling him I would never do something like that and that I had no idea what would have made him feel how he did (aside maybe from the fact that he had decided to eat 5 hits of acid and sit in his small apartment by himself listening to tool) he looked at me like he didn't trust me and like he couldn't believe what I was saying. It's never been quite the same to hang out with the guy since then.

More recently four friends of mine split an ounce of mushrooms. One of them ended up freaking out and became convinced that my friend who gave her the mushrooms was the devil and that this other girl who was there was a witch. She thought that together they were casting some kind of spell that was making her swell and that she was going to die. Her mom and her boyfriend ended up calming her down.

My point is that sometimes these substances can cause paranoid delusional reactions. If I were you I'd try not to dwell on it. If these really are close friends of yours try to hang out with them and have a good time. I know when I finally hung out with my buddy who thought I poisoned him I enjoyed it immensely. It was still in the back of my mind how could this guy think I'd poison him, but it was nice seeing him again and getting to hang out like old times.

Hope everything goes well for you.