Hey all,
This is my first post!

I was born in 1975, I live in Italy and I'm passionate about Entheogenig substances.

Since I was a child I've dealt with and investigated how my mind and body work, I remember clearly of sleepless nights where I would lay awake in bed trying to move single muscles of my body, isolating single toes in my feet.

Then came that year when I grew up something like 4cm in height, it was my 11th year of life.
It started when I passed out after a bike ride with a friend.
Then I started having these terrifying visions at night whenever I would close my eyes: it was more of a sensation of impending doom, a feeling of pins hitting every single pore of my skin, a vision of a corner of a cube so big that I couldn’t see its end, the cube was going to squish me.
My mother would come to my bedroom awaken by my moans and screams and couldn’t wake me out of it. She took me to a doctor that wanted to attach a recording device to my head for 48h. We refused.
It lasted for about a year or so.
Do you know that feeling when you drink alcohol and you smoke weed even though you know they don’t mix together well and you close your eyes and everything starts spinning and you have to open them up because otherwise you’ll throw up or something like it? This was happening to me every night, I would close my eyes and the huge cube and the sensation would come and it would become too strong, too big to bear and so I would have to open my eyes and hope it would go away.

Eventually it stopped.

Then one day - I think I was 15 or something - it happened again. This time I felt stronger and didn’t open my eyes no matter how strong, heavy and close the cube was. Then it passed ad I found myself floating above my sleeping body, watching myself as I slept and it was the best thing that ever happened to me at that time.

That same year I started living a parallel life in my dreams, I would definitely know I was “dreaming” when I was there and I could control many aspects of the dreams. The best part was that many times I would continue this dream where I was in another land and I could see my other life on the other side of the sea. To this day I know I’m dreaming 90% of the time I’m dreaming.

The reason I gained this skill is because I was really depressed, I didn’t know it at that time but I sure was. I would come home from school (a place I never enjoyed for a single moment in my whole life) and go to sleep for 3-5 hours to seek refuge in my other life.

Come 19 years of life and I’m badly failing at school, I don;t have a driving license and the compulsory military service is waiting for me. My closest friends and I organize a hiking trip in the mountains to take LSD for the first time ever in our life.
This experience changed my life for the better, it empowered me to get a driving license, avoid the military service and graduate from school all in the next 6 months.

LSD became a very precious thing to me, to be taken with the utmost respect and precaution, I have often thought about it as a very clean form of nuclear power: very useful but also potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.

Since then I’ve tried Psilocybin Mushrooms, Salvia Divinorum and Peyote Cactus several times, always cautious of doing it in the correct set and setting, even though I admit that there have been a few times when I used some of them in a not-so-ideal situation..

Through the years I’ve read all I could about these substances, their chemistry and their interaction with our body/mind/consciousness - in materialistic and non-materialistic ways but I must admit that the level of some of the questions of the Questionnaire are above my preparation, this is why it is taking for me so long to finish it…

Flash forward to two months ago when a close friend of mine told me he had some DMT.
I was very excited and we did it.
First we built a DIY glass pipe with a small jar that didn’t work so well but allowed us to achieve some kind of visual effect that left both of us wanting more.
Then we found plans to build The Machine and that changed everything: I think I may have had a breakthrough (or a few of them, three so far) that are the reason I came here: I need to talk to other persons that did it to get advice about what I experienced.
So hopefully that will be the topic of my next post, I guess!

Thank you everybody for all your hard work here, it’s very appreciated, and thanks for reading this far.

cheers!