I wanted to share this with my fellow Nexians, in the interests of safety for other psychonauts, to promote caution when mixing psychedelics.

This experience took place earlier in the summer, in a very comfortable setting, in my bedroom and garden one summer afternoon and evening. I was sharing this experience with my then new girlfriend, who is a clinical psychologist who works with psilocybin in a therapeutic content, and someone I spare a very special bond with. This would be our first powerful psychedelic experience together.

Given that we both had a day to spare and the weather was fantastic, we decided to have a trip together. She has a fondness for San Pedro, I've had a gram of synthetic mescaline hcl for a while now so we split that between us. This was nice, and quite gentle, perhaps it had degraded in the time that I've had it, it wasn't as powerful as I was expecting. It was very pleasant though, and we were certainly both quite altered, but not really tripping per se. Senses were definitely heightened, and we were enjoying lounging around listening to music and chatting. I hear some of our hens and ducks outside kicking off, and had a feeling something was off, so went outside, to find one of the hen's chicks was missing. I have a chat with my friend and neighbour about this, and just as we are discussing this, we hear the sound of a distressed bird, while our dogs are in the bushes nearby. I go into the bush and find the missing chick with its foot caught in a bin liner wrapped around the stem of a bush...due to the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I was able to find it and free it. Six or so hours in, after the chick incident, we head outside to lie in the sun by the pond. My girlfriend suggests we maybe smoke a joint, which sounds like a fine idea to me, but I suggest we have a capsule of 4-AcO-DMT instead, so as to hopefully vamp up the psychedelia a bit. I was hoping for and expecting a bit of an expansion of what we already had going on. My lady was down with this plan, so I went to measure out two capsules (in no way what I considered excessive amounts, but weighing out powerful psychedelics while on mescaline I don't think was wise).

I head back outside capsules in hand to enjoy what I thought would be a beautiful summer's evening in a stunning spot in nature. We swallow our capsules and bask in the evening sun taking in all the sights, sounds and scents of nature around us. Around 15-20 mins late, I knew we were in for a wild ride, as powerful geometric patterns were forming with open eyes against the backdrop of blue sky. This concerned me a bit, as I felt at that point the capsules should really have only just dissolved, and yet I was already coming up, hard. I hadn't counted on or desired this, but the setting at least was close to optimal. Things escalate, rapidly. I hear this electrical/mechanical thrumming or whirring, it sounded very real, like it was coming from outside of myself. A minute late, my gf asked whether I could hear this mechanical whirring. We were rapidly entering a very powerful psychedelic experience. The headspace for me had a very "pushy" feel, that was unpleasant and very in my face, and there was a dark, chaotic tint to it. Behind closed eyes, I found myself in a very similar realm or space to a strong vaped DMT experience...only this was only getting stronger with time. I started to vocalise/throat sing, and this started to sculpt and shape the patterns I saw, and gave me some small feeling of being able to navigate the chaos to some degree, which was helpful. My gf was having a really hard time. She's had previous issues on ayahuasca, mushrooms and holotropic breathwork where she really struggles with breathing, and she feels this is linked to birth trauma re-surfacing (she subsequently learned that her birth was a very traumatic one). She was worried about her breathing, so I did my best to comfort and reassure her, and I embraced her and started throat singing again, as much as for my own reassurance as hers, and it seemed to help her too. My little dog came out and hung out with us, his presence was soothing for both of us. Sometime later she moved past this phase, and the sun started to go down, and it was getting cold. There was a slight let up in intensity, but we were both still deep in it. We headed indoors to get cosy and listen to some music.

I was still in a deep state. Music was not the guiding helpful force it sometimes definitely can be in these states. I was lying in the fetal position in bed, hyperventilating. The dark pushy edge to the experience was still very much present and unrelenting, and this combo felt like it was hard on my body and mind. I was dark now, and around 9 or so hours after taking the mescaline, and 3 or so hours since taking the 4-AcO-DMT. I was doing my best to ride out this experience, and without warning, something changed suddenly. My mental state became saturated with a very tangible feeling of darkness, impending doom, despair and hopelessness. I felt weak, and lying there felt like something between a decaying old corpse, or an aborted human fetus. It felt like I was in the shadow of death. It really felt like I was poisoned, and in a great deal of danger. I've never ever had such an experience before. This feeling of dying was nothing to do with an ego-loss type of dying, and it was worrying to be feeling such horrific things at such a late stage of an experience. It felt like my blood pressure was very high. I sat up on the edge of the bed, feeling very tangible feelings of doom. I just tried to stay in the present, to just be in the moment, and take each moment as it came. I was getting painful twinges in my heart, and some weird electric twinges in my brain. Heart attack or seizure really seemed imminent...it was like my system was being worked to the very point of collapse, and it felt like death could occur at any moment. I kept these feelings to myself for a while, until my gf clocked on to something being wrong. She did her best to reassure me, making the valid point that we had both ingested the same quantities of substances, and she was fine, if a little ruffled after her previous gruelling experience. In her view, I was suffering from a panic attack, which may very well have been the case, and perhaps the psychedelic head space amplified this. To me though, it did not feel like a bad trip, it was scary in that unlike other gnarly experiences with psychedelics I've had, it really felt like it was my physical self that was in danger, that my system was poisoned.

This went on for some time...it was truly the darkest, most terrifying, most gruelling experience of my life. I'm a well-travelled psychonaut and my feathers are not easily ruffled, but this was really scary. To me, it genuinely felt like a physical poisoning that was being made mentally manifest by the psychedelic experience. I recall another rather harrowing mixing mescaline as it happens (but falling well short of this experience, at least for me personally), this time with LSD...this was not a winning combination for any of our party on that occasion. There was a dark tint to the experience...physically, it felt hard on one's system (like blood pressure was elevated), mentally it was like being caught in the midst of two powerful psychic tides. My dear sister had a MUCH worse than either myself or my friend on that occasion. She was on the SSRI citalopram at the time (a very foolish oversight on my part...she has used with psilocybin and LSD alone previously to no bad effect). I think she may have experienced serotonin syndrome, and she got very hot...I could see the steam pouring off her. I went to get a glass of water and came back to the room in haste following a commotion, to find my sister trying to jump out of the window, as she was under the impression she was on fire and burning up and she needed to get people's attention. So in this case, it was like the mental experience of her trip was manifesting as the feeling of being on fire, when she seemed to be suffering from hyperthermia.

At some point, things started to drop off in intensity much to my relief, but after a great deal of mental and physical anguish and torture. That night, as I tried to sleep, I kept drifting back into that state of darkness and mental anguish and heart twinges...I took a valium to help get me off to sleep. I awoke with no side effects other than some substantial residual humbling.

I wanted to share this as a warning to fellow psychonauts, to be cautious when mixing different psychedelics. Certainly I will take much more care with future explorations. Stay safe y'all

If there's ever a next time you feel overwhelmed or what not, have some Lemon Balm around, try about 3 to 4 grams of dried leaf (or about 1 to 2.5 grams if you have more potent Lemon Balm) made into a tea and consumed, it'll help smooth/chill things out a good bit, it's really worth the try imo.

This type of thing just happened to me with some strong mushrooms and weed .
The experience was so overwhelmingly intense I couldn't handle it and I lost it . I spiraled myself right into a full blown panic attack .
The only thing that pulled me out of it was some rescue remedy that I just happened to have with me in my pack. In the future I want to always have something to take in an emergency like that either a Valium or an Ativan or something like that .
I'm glad things worked out for you . We have to be careful .

Thanks for sharing Bancopuma. That's a pretty grueling experience. It must have taken you a lot of courage to write that out for us too.

I've been some pretty dark places on some pretty poorly thought out and executed psychedelic cocktails too. It's funny how things can turn like that, and the danger seems so mortal.

But in the end, not even a chicken was harmed.

The closest i've ever come to this was with a mighty dose of changa. Herbs used were Gingko biloba, brahmi and passionflower. It felt like my mind was turning inside out, warping way more than usual with DMT. It felt like it was doing irreparable damage, to the point of extremely painful cognitive patterns, manifesting themselves as emotions becoming flesh. I'm pretty stoic in general, so this tsunami of emotions was easily the most "pain" i've ever felt on DMT. I don't usually pass out after tripping, but i did in this instance, just from the sheer intensity. I felt fine the next morning, but it was pretty terrifying.

On one mushroom trip I somehow convinced myself that I was poisoned, because something had gone wrong with the grow (some some mushrooms where a little wrinkled during harvest, but I didn't think much of it at the time). The bad feelings started by thinking to myself "something is wrong" and ballooned into me thinking I was going to die, pacing back and forth in my room.

It was horrific. I'm usually pretty mellow and could never relate to people with panic attacks. That got flipped on its head that night.

At one point when I was considering asking for help (I was tripping in secret with only my father in law sleeping downstairs) I sat down and asked myself, OK what is really wrong here? With eyes closed I mentally examined my body trying to be objective about it. In an instant the feelings of being poisened (tighetness in the chest, guided breathing) evaporated. I realized it was all in my head and laughed at myself.

I went on the Nexus chat and got some LOLs there too from Musky which was nice and reassuring

Upon reflection I think the experience taught me how powerful the mind can be at creating a mental construct that becomes "reality". I think some of these constructs are taught to us as children and we live in them, without realizing the mental walls we are in or questioning them.

Do you think the heart twinges and high blood pressure where physical effects from the drug combo? Or do you think they were driven by the mind state (psycosomatic)?

Thanks for the reflections folks. I like the sound of lemon balm tea.

Loveall, in all likelihood this experience was psychosomatic in origin. But there was this tangible physicality that was really quite harrowing, it really did feel like a poisoning being made manifest in my mental experience. But of course I know how suggestible the mind is in psychedelic states and powerful the mind is at creating mental reality constructs as you say.

Some further reflection, I mentioned this harrowing experience to one of the medical doctors when I was being screened for participation in the DMT brain imaging studies at Imperial College. He said that mescaline has been known to elevate blood pressure, so perhaps in combination with the 4-AcO-DMT it had some kind of effect. What I associate with a worrying feeling of high blood pressure I've experienced on Syrian rue and LSD, and also a previous mescaline and LSD experience, which was unpleasant and felt like it was working my physical system hard. I will never combine mescaline with another psychedelic again, that's for sure, and personally prefer the cactus experience over pure mescaline, it seems more holistic in some way in my experience, rather like ibogaine vs iboga, I've come to feel that the other alkaloids in the cactus produce a beneficial entourage effect that surpasses the effect of the single isolated compound.

On the mental/physical experience of these substances, last week I had an otherwise very positive and therapeutic psilohuasca experience. I made a tea of 3.5g Syrian rue seeds, and had a large dose (2.2g dry) of potent P. hoogshagenii var. convexa/Semperviva mushrooms. This combination induced a very exalted. beautiful, light filled experience, while at the same time allowing me to access and examine my shadow in a very deep way. Mentally it was a wonderful experience, and quite a lot more gentle and tender than I had been anticipating. Physically was a different story. I vibe very well physically and mentally with mushrooms, I think they are my most cherished psychedelic, and I had it on good authority that these particular mushrooms were clean friendly mushrooms (and indeed they are highly regarded shamanically by various indigenous Psilocybe using groups in Mexico). The Syrian rue really didn't agree with me. I've had a fair bit of experience with the plant over the years, including a few unpleasant experiences. This particular experience was highly unpleasant...I started off with nausea and vomiting (which I was expecting), followed by a quite intense gut pain that lasted hours, along with pain in what seemed to be my kidneys, followed by feverish symptoms. Despite the exalted state my mind was in, my body was really struggling with the rue. At one point, things took a much darker [mental] turn, and it felt like I could drift back into the dark experience mentioned here. So it really does seem to me that symptoms of physiological issues or poisoning can become reflected in one's mental experience at times. I was sitting for my gf at the time as it happens and I kept silent about this and did my best to focus on her in the hope it would dissipate in time, which it did eventually. I'm not sure why my body reacted the way it did (I made a tea from the whole seeds which has worked well for me in the past...I prefer not to ingest solid plant matter with rue, and rather than an extract I wanted the full plant experience on this occasion). I've had these seeds for years in my fridge, so perhaps something had changed over that time. But given how unpleasant the experience was, I disposed of my remaining seeds, and would be wary of ever using Syrian rue again. Perhaps my dosage was a little too high (I added an extra half gram of seeds to my dosage to make up for any degradation that may have occurred in the years that I'd had them).

Wow thank you for sharing this BP

The utter slap.
Yeah...

Yes, thanks for sharing BP

I like skullcap amd camomile together with lemon balm for a soothing tea. Good stuff, and the plants are easy to grow and keep on coming back each year.

Wow.

Parts of that are so familiar. I have been to dark, scary interminable places on chacruna, where I also felt like something physiological was wrong, and that I was going to stop breathing and die if I let it take over and didn't fight going under.... to the point where I have sworn off chacruna forever.

I also had a very scary mescaline mix trip. I dosed 700mg of extracted mescaline, and got impatient after two hours, but decided to wait a little longer. At almost 3 hours there was still no effect. It was my first extraction from homegrown cactus, and also my first d-limonene extraction, so I guessed that something must have gone wrong and that what I extracted was, evidently, inactive. So I took the two tabs of acid that I had brought with me and reserved in the event of a mescaline misfire.

I was outdoors in a park, but fortunately not too far from home. The mescaline started to kick in very shortly after the paper tabs started to dissolve in my mouth, and I was actually quite excited at the prospect of a bigger trip than I had planned. I walked up the path to the top of Mount Royal, where, at the lookout I spotted an approaching storm. Dark, crazy, bulbous and rolling clouds were lit up by little distant jolts of lighting, like bulbs switched on and off in a dark blanket.

I was coming up fast. And hard. But I was delighted and it was delightful. I figured I should head down and home, given the approaching darkness. I had no idea the storm was prefiguring the tempest that was to come in my head.

The sun was also low, so it got quite sombre fast, and then the rain poured down like I had never seen rain pour as I got down to street level. I was in a super good mood and tripping quite heavily, and the walk home I took slowly as I was already drenched. I remember feeling like a clown, as strange as that sounds. I danced in the empty street as I headed home, like a child, jumping in and out of puddles and watching the raindrops dissemble the colourful reflected glow of sodium streetlamp and changing traffic lights on the pavement, and followed the travelling pinpoints of headlights through what seemed to me like layers of wet, gossamer sheeting between me and the cars - the rain was splendorous and magical.

I got home and dried off, then put on some music that quickly started to annoy me. I changed music, several times, but everything sounded grating and pounding, so I turned off the receiver. Then I started to panic. I was home with nothing to do, I was still coming up with speed and fury and I had at least another ten hours to go. I tried to calm myself with some success, but the feeling of panic was just around the bend, tracking me. I turned on the television and put on a dvd to try and distract myself. I don't even remember what the movie was, or remember one frame of the ten minutes I watched before the panic built up so heavily that I had to switch it off.

I went into my bedroom and realized I was shivering and frozen. I climbed into bed and despite being dry, and under dry covers in a dry bed, everything seemed wet and dripping and frigid. I closed my eyes and tried to calm and warm myself. I had this feeling of doom and panic and imminent calamity that weighed on my mind like a block of cement. The closed eye visuals were just geometric noise at the beginning and I was in no state to even appreciate their beauty. And then, emerging out of the cacophony of spirals and cones and the calculus of multidimensional shapes and figures was a massive, three dimensional figure eight, undulating serpent-like, flowing around itself, but unmoving.

Conjured from some unknown recesses of my mind, it was at once an eight, an ouroboros, a writhing symbol of the infinite and a mobius strip. The other patterns were now completely gone, and this headless and tailless, multihued and rippling snake-skinned form was against a backdrop of light, cerulean and limitless blue that extended up, down, to the sides, toward me and away, deep into the eternal distance in all conceivable directions.

And then I became it.

I forgot who I was, but knew that a moment ago I had not been this thing I was witnessing, though now I was. And would always be. And I panicked. And the panic made me sink deeper into it, and though I wanted it to speed up - as if speeding up would somehow make it go away - it remained painfully slow in its inner gyrations. Its listlessness was my persecution.

I felt pain - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual torture. I felt misery and ruin as if they were objects within me, darkness and annihilation and utter oblivion, shapes within this flowing shape that was my new eternal perdition.

It went on and on and on... to the extent that I don't actually remember it ending. But when it did, I was back to being me, and while warm, I now was truly drenched in my own sweat. I was completely under the sheets and blankets, my hair sopping wet and my whole body aching from trembling and tightening in panic for hours.

The rest of the trip was a sort of recovery period, and a while there were still residual visuals and significant body load, the trip seemed to have shifted or even almost ended very abruptly. Within about an hour and a half I was more or less back to baseline. It was past four in the morning and though it was the first time I had checked the hour since dosing, a quick calculation led me to conclude that I had been this 'thing', this unserpent eight shaped thing, for more than eight hours.

I have had other terrifying experiences - some that compare in depth to this - but never have I utterly disappeared and become something else for such an incredibly long time. I still find it staggering to think about, and this is at least 8 years later.

I think mescaline is something best experienced on its own. I have heard too many stories of bad mixes. Not to anthropomorphize it, but I can almost say, after this experience, that it does not want to be in the presence of other substances, and lets you know in no uncertain terms if you dare to mix it. Although, I have to admit, 700mg plus two tabs of strong acid is quite the hefty dose...

Thanks for sharing - and for reading my experience.

Cheers,

JBArk

Sounds very familiair to what physical symptoms I experience on a nearly daily basis.

While I spend a few day since days in prison especially. I had episodes pretty much at random of hard time breathing. Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, I am reminded right now that the first time I actually encountered this was after taking a small dose of 4-aco-dmt. ? I think my head was calm perhaps from taking small dose of 3meopcp as well. But my body was having tension from my neck to my chest. I was not having any psychological symptoms but my body was giving off a lot of somatic symptoms therefore I tend to think the mechanics are physical. They may come if you ask me from a Emotional-somatic system. Perhaps the hormone. In my experience the thyroid is very much involved here. As I experience these episodes more often than not I feel a pressure in the thyroid. It can be enlarged.

My theory is perhaps pent up energy has no way of expressing itself into the outside world and it gets stuck in a hyperloop in the body. The emotion accompinying it is sort of like repressed subconscious emotions accompanying this fact of unreleased energy/potential potentiated in the conscious experience. Probably due to bornt/learned coping mechanisms holding on to familiair things and habits. This explains why this was the greatest for me to deal with during time in a prison cell. Since there are no coping mechanisms in place there the mind is eventually faced with it's own unconscious material more. And forced to deal with the emotional pent up energy. As I deal with it I tend to feel an energy surging through my chest area like a humming bird calmly but energetically awaiting to fight and love in this world.

As a last note: I suspect the physical symptoms are real (people die of unknown causes by the thousands) (While not as immediate as you experience during a psychedelic experience) as at some point while distracting myself from myself for a period of months my chest felt weaker. I looked up heart attack symptoms and one of them was showing veins in ur chest area. I saw all my veins and a sort of transparancy in my skin. I must have had a pretty high blood pressure. And a sort of weakening feeling exactly where my heart is. I feel a pain there quite a lot.

I admit I had lack of sleep to combine with this. But had I pushed this state of conscious destruction to more extremesed I well could have gotten worse.

Anyhow, hope this helps.

The closest symptoms to this I ever had weren't strictly from mixing psychedelics. They were more akin to genuine poisoning. It is, however, relevant so I'll share nonetheless.

I once made a tincture of wild lettuce (Lactuca virosa), columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) and Welsh poppy (Meconopsis cambrica) because I'd been weeding the garden and wondered what the plants might have to tell me. Some months, or years, later it seemed like a good time to test this tincture so I mixed a teaspoonful of it into a little water and swigged it down. It should be reasonably obvious that this was a pretty stupid thing to do, given, firstly, the known toxicity of Aquilegia (cardiac glycosides) and the relatively unknown effects of Welsh poppy, and secondly, the untested potency of the tincture. It was truly fool's luck that got me through this so DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EMULATE! What I did could easily have killed me.

So, at some point after drinking the tincture I started to notice a mixture of physical and mental symptoms, but principally the strength of my heartbeat was markedly increased. With every beat the heart was simply squeezing much harder. It was easy for me to notice that this effect could become dangerous and, perhaps due to the sedative effect of the Lactuca virosa, I maintained a calm and rational state of mind. It was immediately obvious that any form of stress or anxiety could increase my heart rate and rapidly kill me with a heart attack, so I resolved to lie down and meditate my way through the experience as best I could.

So there I was with, well, not exactly a pounding heart - but it nonetheless felt as though my heart could jump out of my chest at any moment. My breathing I kept deeeep and sloooow and my mind remained blank, to the best of my meditative efforts. This was really good because going into this meditative state, it seemed to me, synergised with the effects of the welsh poppy alkaloids and I would reach a point where a bright golden light radiated throughout my being, accompanied by a huge wave of euphoria.

As you might be able to imagine, this aspect of the experience was somewhat exciting to encounter - so I noticed my heart rate increase in response. Of course, this was not the optimal physical response so somehow I adjusted my mindset to slow my heart back down, largely by telling myself that it must be so...

This continued for what must have been several hours until it finally wore off, repeatedly going through these waves of golden-illuminated euphoria and subsequent easing back from the excitement...

So, the actual relevance here is that perhaps a year or two later I somewhat thoughtlessly overdosed myself with an accidental extract of incredibly potent Psilocybe mushrooms - which is something I described in a psilocin extraction thread here a while back. The ensuing panic and severely elevated heart rate was greatly ameliorated by having had this prior experience with actual cardiac poisoning and in general the lie-down-and-meditate approach is the only thing from these experiences that I would actually recommend to anyone else.

Take care everybody!

Sounds like a wild and unexpected ride and I wonder if the mescaline simply kicked in a lot later than expected along with the 4-aco. I've had an experience where a dose of mescaline seemingly didn't kick on until 8 hours later. I know that seems ridiculous but it's hard to believe that a smoking a joint could boot me into full blown psychedelia despite not tripping at all for a whole night. And I'd smoked weed on the tail end of mesc before without issue. The first time was just mesc HCL, this time was some HCL and some acetate.

As far as I know mesc HCL is very stable but can just have a delayed onset. You took 500mg which isn't exactly a tiny dose either, especially if it's very pure. I wonder if anyone else here has experience with mesc not kicking in until long after the trip should be tapering off ? This might not even be the case for you but it did make me think.

hmmmh maybe that birnd chick you saved had the Lord of death standing right next to it and also some kinda hinn cheering at the spectacle, perhaps you picked something up in those bushes....

Coming back to a Grovian interpretation.

When those geometric patterns begin to appear in the sky. Sounds a bit like a Grovian COEX system is starting to emerge. One of the transcendental kind of experience.

Seems like you weren't expecting or inviting of a heavy experience such as this. According to Grof. denying a transcendenting experience wanting to emerge is parallel to denying well-needed therapy/healing session.
For the ego it seems like a good descision but the soul is wanting to express itself.
In fact, due to our fears and insecurities (you weren't feeling like a divine experience at the time). The universe doesn't care for our ego needs.

So now I think at that moment you started resisting a trip trying to come-up. We all know that resisting a trip is recipe for disaster. I have to go, due to time issues. But such is my theory. What do you or ur friend think?

Of all the classic psychedelics, i think phenethylamines are the most physical. And mescaline is definately no exception there. Combining it with another vaso and bronchconstrictor could easily cause feelings of being poisoned. Especially bronchoconstriction. When it is just very mildly there, you don't even realy notice what's going on. But you do feel that something is not right with your body. That feeling of not getting enough fresh air is like a very basic, biologically hardwired panic trigger.

I've had such experiences as well, and i know that feeling of being poisoned. You can feel it in your muscles, lungs, stomach and kidneys, everywhere.

It is dark indeed. Like the force of life itself is being sucked right out of you. Luckily it doesn't seem to have affected you that much. Or at least, the fact that it didn't make you turn away from psychedelics altogether is a sign that you have managed to get over the most of this rough ride, i think.

Stay well.