Date: Feb 20, 2014

PRE-CONDITIONS
(mind)Set: Ready—somewhat anxious, but feeling good overall.
Setting (physical location): Sitting in front of my alter in my bedroom
time of day: 10:15
last meal: Dinner last night, whey protein and water after the gym this morning.

PARTICIPANT
Gender: (male)
body weight: (175lb)

BIOASSAY
Substance(s): PES Hawaiian Mushroom
Dose(s): 4.0g
Method of administration: ground and mixed in orange juice.

EFFECTS
Administration time:10:15
Duration: 4 hours
First effects: 8 minutes
Peak: 1.5 hours-2 hours
Come down:2.5 hours
Baseline: 4 hours

Intensity (overall): 7/10

Assessment
Pleasantness: (3/4)
Unplesantness: (3/4)
Visual Intensity: (2/4)


REPORT

We decided to take this trip, little brother and I, at the beginning of the week. Last week (6 days ago) we took a much lighter dose out in nature, but this one was planned a bit differently. We planned to consume in the morning, after the gym, work through the trip in my bedroom, next to the alter, and then on the way down go for a walk.

It should be noted that this trip, and the one from last week, have been framed as “practice.” Little brother and I will be going on a long backpacking trip later this year, and during that hike we plan to consume a large quantity of mushroom and DMT. As such, we need to practice both hiking and tripping together. We’ve hiked about 80 miles in the last two weekends, then we tripped during a 3 day hike on a light dose. Today’s trip was meant to be practice at just tripping itself and being ready for heavy trips while we’re out in nature. So we both took a heavier dose today than we took last week.

Last week little brother ate 2.0 grams and I ate 2.5 grams. It should be noted that his tolerance to all triptamines is about 75% that of my own, so he tends to take a bit less of whatever substance and trip a bit harder than I will. This week he took 3.0 grams and I ate 4.0 grams. I was somewhat concerned that having tripped 6 days ago would affect today’s trip—also I vaped a little bit of DMT yesterday morning (barely threshold dose) and wasn’t sure if this would affect my tolerance going into this mushroom trip. That said, when I got to about hour 2 of today’s trip, I wasn’t the least bit worried about “tolerance” after last weekend—I straight up lost my noggin.

This morning I woke at 6am and went to the gym. I had an amazing workout and headed straight home. I ate whey protein and water—wanted to be on “empty stomach” for the trip, but also needed protein after the workout.

Also, and I’m not sure where else to take note of this, I recently bought some leaves to make change, so I have some caapi on hand. I had planned to roll a caapi joint and smoke it on the way up. I ground a bunch of it and had papers and everything ready… LOL… the need for that never arrived. I’ve never tried mixing a smoked MAOI with mushroom before, but if anyone would like to comment and give some feedback, I’d be appreciative of your comments. My understanding is that it can kind of launch you up into a higher realm, but there was no point during today’s trip where I thought to myself, “Oh, this is nice, let’s make it even higher.” Trust me—the “high” was plenty. But if anyone has experience smoking caapi during a mushroom trip and know it to do more (or something different) than just increase intensity, then I’m very interested to hear about it.

At 10:00 we ground our doses, mixed them in orange juice (I put mine in a fancy wine glass just to feel like a classy lad) and then we went upstairs to my bedroom. I sat in front of the alter and started meditating. Little brother was not far behind. I was watching the clock because I have OCD and needed to take my dose at an appropriate interval of the hour. Little brother was not watching the clock, but he meditated over his dose, mixed it, and drank it at exactly 10:15, which is when I started my timer and drank my dose. We acknowledged one another, and then the “hard” part was over, at least for an hour or so. After we drank down our doses, i immediately felt a lessening of my anxiety and I went about my “activities.”

I have a mono tub that reached it’s point of readiness this morning and was ready to harvest, so I planned to take care of that to keep me occupied on the come up. I started picking them and putting them in a dehydrator. I literally felt my first effect at minute 8 and I told little brother so. About 5 minutes later he said the same—that he felt his first effect of the body load.

I barely made it through picking all the mono tub before I needed to take a step back. I was sitting cross legged at my alter, and that was minute 15. The body load was coming on really heavy. I started to wonder if I’d be able to make it to the one hour mark before smoking the joint that little brother had just finished rolling.

I laid down on my bed and the tremors started. I don’t know if any of you get this effect, but I almost always get the shakes during hour 1 of a heavy dose. It usually starts at minute 15 and goes on to the one hour mark or even as much as 1.5 hour. It never bothers me much, but to a spectator who isn’t warned, it could look kinda scary. Basically it starts as a light need to shiver (no association with temperature at all), then it becomes an almost convulsive type thing by the half hour point. I can make it stop if I need to, but it just feels good to shake. I tell people that it’s the mushroom’s urge to dance once it gets into my body, but I’m not really into dancing, so I just convulse.

I shook like that consistently today until the 1 hour mark.

At the 20 minute mark I went from in front of my alter to laying on my bed—it was starting to get really heavy. I wasn’t “losing it” yet, but it was coming on heavy, and I found it easier to go on my bed. There I did some stretches and weird yoga-esque stuff. It felt awesome, and I was really happy that no one was watching other than little brother—I don’t need to worry about his judgement. The mushrooms were hitting him at about the same time as it was hitting me, but I think it started “kicking” me a bit earlier.

At the 1 hour mark is when I sat back at my alter. Little brother had rolled that joint, like I said, and he wanted to light it earlier, but I have OCD (like I said) and wanted to wait to the one hour mark. At the one hour mark we burned it up and it was aaaaawesome.

I’d say that from minute 60 to minute 90, I was pretty much in the best place in the universe. I was happy, I was absolutely tripping, but I wasn’t losing my mind in any way yet. I was soooo happy. At one point I started laughing (not uncontrollably, but about as close to uncontrollably as one can be without losing control) in a way that I haven’t in way too long. I wasn’t laughing at anything in particular, but I was laughing all the same. I though to myself that this is something that a lot of people do under the influence of this substance, but I normally don’t do—In fact, I couldn’t think of any time in which I’d done that stereotypical shroom-laughing. I’m normally more stoic and I just sit there and gain an appreciation for reality and the universe. This time though, I just let out laughter and it felt so good. I thought about the studies that have been recently published about use of mushrooms and treatment of depression and some types of anxiety. The laugh felt so good that I turned to little brother and said, “that’s a kind of laugh that I need more often in my life.” I could feel the benefit in my life. I could feel my life changing from a laugh. It was too good. Little brother joined in a laugh at about that same time, but it wasn’t quite as unrestrained.

Little brother mentioned that we should get some ice and smoke a bowl out of the water pipe, which I thought was a marvelous idea now that the joint was gone, so I ran downstairs into the kitchen. I so wish that I could have footage of that adventure. In my bedroom where I’d been for the past hour, everything was good and familiar—I was used to it—but when I got downstairs, everything looked so strange and unfamiliar. I paused for a second and wondered why I’d come down here, then remembered it was to get ice. I reached into the freezer and grabbed some, not quite sure how to transport it. I put it into a gallon ziplock bag, apparently because I thought I was going to somehow smash that bag on the floor to crush the ice up, but as I stood there with a bag of ice in hand, it occurred to me that this plan made no sense—I had a blender, so it would be better to use that. I took the ice out of the ziplock bag and put it into the blender and blended it up.

It reminded me of the scene in Electric Kool-aide Acid Test where the Pranksters would trip on acid and do normal chores like try to fix an engine on the bus as a means of “practice” in tripping. It was absurd to me at the time, but as I was grinding ice, it totally made sense—it was exactly the same thing that I was doing.

I felt extremely self-conscious for three reasons: 1) I was tripping my head off and nothing seemed “right” around me, and 2) I wasn’t sure if my hands were shaking, and 3) it seemed like I was doing something very abnormal—grinding up ice in a blender. All the blinds in the kitchen were down though, so I knew that no one was watching me. I looked at my hand and couldn’t tell if it was shaking or not. I wondered because when I’m out tripping on the trail and trying to repack my bag, I want to know if I look like a tweaker (cause that’s how I felt) or if I look “normal.” I’m inclined to think the latter, but I need more “practice” at these small tasks while in a psychedelic state of mind to know for sure.

When I got the ice I brought it upstairs, filled the water tube and the bowl was unbelievable. We both toked in awe. The high was as good as watching it burn when little brother took his hit. Watching that smoke man… it was just so beautiful.

I was sitting in front of my alter at this point, cross legged, as I’ve practiced about every day, and I looked up through my window. I’d close my eyes, and let the sun hit my eyelids. This period lasted for somewhere around 20 minutes. I could close my eyes and start to get DMT-esque visuals. They weren’t quite as fast as DMT though, and they spun and twisted in a slower type way. These visuals were like a car at an auto show that spins slowly round in circles, where DMT is usually like a power drill or something of the like. I saw pyramids, eyes, hands, mandalas, and mixings of all these symbols together. It was pleasant and certainly not overwhelming.

This is the point that I’m most curious what would have happened if I’d smoked caapi. If any of you have experience, please let me know. Terrence talks about “vegetable television” after smoking caapi on a mushroom trip, but I’m not quite sure if that means that it made the visuals more intense, or more clear, or what.

I’d alternate between those closed eye moments of zen to opening my eyes and looking up out my window, above my alter. It was slightly overcast, so I could look to the sun without it burning my eyes. I have two prisms hanging in my window, and I spent some time looking into them, seeing how they refracted light and appreciating life and my place in the universe. Some birds flew by and I watched them for perhaps three minutes as they flew about. I turned to little brother and said, “Birds are pretty; I can see why girls get them tattooed on them. I would get a bird tattooed on me if I was a girl I guess…” We laughed together.

Little brother and I were talking back and fourth and having a very pleasant time throughout here. We’d meditate quietly here and there, then talk, then stretch, then go back to meditating quietly. Little brother spent this time, while I was looking up out my window, talking to the mushrooms. Like I said, we’d picked the mono tub right as the mushrooms came up, so we had a big pile of mushrooms there between us, and little brother would look at them and laugh, chuckle, and then tell me he’s “talking” with the mushroom. I told him that I totally understood. This would have been the 60-90 minute mark.

At about 1.5 hours, little brother asked me how I was doing. I was tripping hard at this point, but holding everything together pretty well. I was mostly enjoying the trip still. But it was becoming heavy. I started talking through the things that had been coming to mind. I was yammering on when I noticed that he was sitting there sort of dazed with his hands in a “T” signaling me to stop talking. I later talked to him (a couple days later) and he told me that he gave me that sign because he was about to puke—it was the one time where he felt nausea during the trip. He tends to get sick with mushrooms on an empty stomach far more than I do, so he ate a few bites of brown rice right after drinking the mushroom brew this morning. He later said that this is the only time he felt sick during the trip.

I started to worry about him just a little bit during this time and for the next hour, but he was fine. The mushrooms were just hitting him a bit hard. He has a bit less experience with these higher doses, so I told him to try laying down on the bed if it was coming on too heavily. He did—he laid down with his head at the foot of my bed and closed his eyes. He laid there for an hour and a half tripping his mother-loving head off. I thought that he’d gone to the place that I call “la-la land.” I’ve tripped with people in the past who couldn’t handle heavy trips and they’d just desentigrate into babbling balls of nonsense. I expected that this was somewhere like where little brother was at, but when he came out the other side and talked to me about it, I seemed to have been mistaken. He was tripping really hard, and perhaps in a way that was unpleasant at times, but he said after coming out of it that once he laid down on the bed he felt amazing there forward—I just didn’t hear anything from him and he had his eyes closed.

This was the hardest part of the trip for both of us. The come up was challenging in its own right, but it wasn’t all that difficult. Mostly I just laid on the bed and wiggled until the hour mark hit, then I smoked with brother, found myself in awe of the streams of smoke, then went and sat cross legged at my alter. I made a comment to little brother that it’s just the first 60 minutes where that anxiety thing exists, and after that it’s smooth sailing.

Well, don’t count your chickens before they hatch, my friend, because right after that I had a wonderful half hour. Then the 1.5 hour mark to the 2.5 hour mark was nothing short of work. I was tripping very hard at this point. I was slightly worried about little brother who mumbled or giggled from time to time as he laid there with his eyes closed, but I figured that he wasn’t doing any harm and that he’d be back to normal in no time. He had less experience with these trips than I did though, so I felt kind of bad that I couldn’t offer him assurance that it’d be okay and help him through it. Ultimately however he needs to learn what that dose is like and he needs to learn that even when trips get super-intense, they eventually subside.

So during this 60 minute period, I was pretty much losing my mind. I was probably holding it together from an outside perspective, but my thoughts were racing incredibly fast (probably the hardest feature to deal with), my vision was darting around, and I had this weird anxiety-like feeling that wasn’t exactly anxiety, but something just didn’t feel “right.” It wasn’t 100% unbearable, but it was categorically unpleasant as a whole.

The visuals were not all that intense. I get this sort of lens flair type thing that happens when I’m tripping where everything has a ring circle around it and casts off sparks of rainbows—yeah I know that sounds weird, but it’s the best I can do to explain it. I was getting slight tracers, but the stereotypical bendy-warpy-wavy-breathing effect never took place for me (later on when I asked little brother, he reported something similar in regards to the visuals). I really think that it’s because of the fact that I tripped mushrooms last weekend and have had DMT pretty steadily in my weekly routine for the past six months or so. Little brother told me that he had visuals that sound a bit heavier than what I got, and much different, but he also reported that he noted the visuals to be less “warpy-bendy” than the week prior, which also goes on to corroborate my theory that visuals are diminished as a result of tolerance/frequent use of triptamines.

I used to do acid a lot a few years back—pretty much once a week for about two months—and I found that after awhile the visuals would die down even though the trip would still persist as strong as ever. So I do now believe in the theory of frequent use contributing to a lack of visual intensity. This however is not to be mistaken for a lack of overall trip intensity! Today was the second time where I’ve dosed a bit higher than I might otherwise on account of the fact that I tripped fewer than 7 days ago and thought my tolerance would be to high, only to find myself laying on my bedroom floor at hour 3 wishing that I’d just done a “normal” dose.

Anyways, during the one hour period where the trip was most intense, I was mostly reassured by the fact that I’d done this before. I thought a lot about “practice” and how this whole trip was about practicing for the longer hike we’ll be taking later in the year. I thought about how when I’m tripping out there it won’t be as easy and how much less comfort I’ll have without being in my own home space. This was practice, and it was easier than the last time that I reached this point in a mushroom journey because the last time I felt like I was losing it, I eventually came down. That was my second 5 gram trip and I had a very unpleasant time for basically 2-3 hours, but by hour three I felt like I was in heaven. i’d reached “ecstasy.” It makes me think back to the quote that I think Pinchbeck mentions in Breaking Open the Head that (and I’m paraphrasing here) white man’s medicine makes you feel good first and bad later, but natural plant medicines make you feel bad first and good later. Having been through a “bad” mushroom trip before and come out the other side to feel alive and free, I knew today when I was tripping hard that the difficulty would pass.

So I’ve been to this point before. I’m at 2 hours in and I’m pretty much losing my business. I’m “holding it together” but it’s an absolute strain to do so. I know that it’ll pass and that I’m going to make it through, but this is when it occurs to me that this whole journey is here for practice. I have always been told that if someone’s losing it on mushrooms, they just need to eat some food and it can make the trip subside, but I’d never tried it. I had had experiences where eating too soon before the trip totally prevented the mushrooms from taking hold in a reasonable time and this also caused diminished effects, so I had reason to believe that it would be true. The last time that I was in extreme-mushroom-trip-land and facing difficulty however, I wanted to get through the entire thing to see if I could, but this time I’d already proven myself, and I wanted to see for the sake of knowing, if I’m losing my mind in a trip and I eat some food, what does it do.

Little brother has nausea issues sometimes when he does empty stomach doses, so he chased his dose today with a couple bites of unsalted brown rice just to settle the gut. It had worked for him well. When I hit the 2.5 hour mark, I decided that I wanted to try eating some too.

I waited to 2.5 hours because I wanted to feel the trip starting to wear off before I ate anything—I have no idea why other than my OCD, but that’s what it was. So at 2.5 hours, I felt a very slight, but still tangible subsiding of the trip, and I started eating the brown rice bite by bite. It was terrible. I always hate eating when I’m tripping, but this was even worse because it was just old brown rice without any seasoning. I tried to think of it like hiking, step by step, one after the next. It wasn’t for pleasure, but to make a result. And so I ate that rice bite by bite for about 15 minutes. I had to chase every bite with a swig of water just to get it down.

By the time I was at 2 hours and 45 minutes, I was in a much more mellow place and I was very clearly coming down. The rice made a huge difference. I wanted to offer some to little brother who was still laying on the bed, but I wanted him to go through the whole thing on his own first so that he had a point of comparison for future trips.

From that point forward, I was good. I was still tripping pretty hard until about the 3-3.5 hour mark, but it was much more manageable and I could almost start to make sense of it. I had some really profound realizations at about this point that mostly apply to my personal life. I started to identify some circles and patterns in my life, a lot like how Terrance talks about the Time Wave. I looked back at my great grandfather who passed away last year and compared his life with my own. I don’t have a lot of people who I really look up to in my life, but my great grandfather is one of them. Him, Gandhi and Malcolm X. Those are the lives that have resinated most closely with my own. I know a lot about Malcolm X, but I need to learn about Gandhi, and I need to learn a lot more about my grandfather.

I work as a teacher in my other job, and last week I was talking to a student about essay conclusions and how to write a closing line. The student asked, “Is that like the ‘and so what’ line?” I didn’t know what she was talking about at first, but after giving it some thought, I said that, “yes; that’s exactly what you want to do at the end of your essay—answer the question of “and so what.” Well as I was tripping here this morning and looking at my grandfather’s life and all the great things that he did, I thought, “and so what?” He still died, just like his brother, and the world’s still going on. So what’s the point? I’m going to die too, and when it’s all said and done, so what? I’ll be the guy who smoked a lot of DMT, ate a lot of mushrooms, left his “conventional” job and walked around in the woods for months. So what?

I don’t know… I guess that I get to these places in heavier mushroom trips where it’s hard to put it into words. It usually comes right after that breakthrough point at about 2-2.5 hours, and it’s just beyond words. I can just start to see all the patterns in my life connecting with the world around me so that I can really understand how “everything happens for a reason” rather than just chanting it as a mantra. I never did cry this time, but it was profound.

I went into my closet and pulled out a pice of paper; I didn’t have a pencil on hand, so I grabbed a compass and started writing with it. I made notes, largely what I’ve just talked about in the preceding paragraphs, and labeled it “Very Important Sh*t.” Next to that I wrote “And So what?” and underlined it. At the bottom of the page, under all of my other notes, I wrote “Always do things that are good ideas,” referring mostly to the trip that I took today, but also to everything else in life; I don’t want to be a “yes man” who just says “yes” to everything, but I do want to say yes to things that are good ideas. I think that too often people go, “Oh yeah, we totally should do [insert whatever here]; that’s a great idea!” but they never actually do it. They want to be the person who would be into the thing, but not the person who actually does the thing.

It’s like this flesh hook suspension thing that I do. I can’t go into it all here, but l I hang from hooks about once every 3 months. I’ve been doing it for about three years now, and it’s a really important part of my life. So I was talking about it at a bar a couple months ago, and this guy got all excited and said that he wanted to try it. I gave him the information and he said that he’ll definitely do it at the next event we have. He told me he’s turning 30 and really wants to mark this turning point in his life that way. Well, come last week I saw him again at the same bar and I asked if he’d put in his deposit to suspend on Saturday. As expected, he made some excuse about being really busy and that he didn’t know that it was this Saturday, maybe he’d see if he can make it if his wife is at work. Bla bla bla. The point is that there’s a big difference between being the guy who wants do to something and the guy who does it. I don’t every want to be the guy who talks about it.

Anyways, I’m starting to bird walk here. At the 3 hour mark I was quite good—still tripping, but tangibly on my way down. I turned to brother at that point and asked how he was doing. I hadn’t seen his pupils in an hour and a half, but he perked right up and said that he was doing fine. He was still tripping pretty hard, but he’d never left his body (completely) or gone totally bonkers. I think that more than anything he was just laying there working his way through the journey. I told him about eating and that it really helped my trip subside a bit. I made him a bowl of cereal and brought it upstairs for him to eat. We burned some and at the 4 hour mark we went out for a walk, as we had planned before the trip.

We were both pretty much down when we stepped out to go for a walk. He was tripping a bit more than I was though because he reached a higher trip overall and because I’d eaten a half hour before he started to. We walked up the block where there’s a wooded trail and we followed that up a hill and into the forest. I was 90% “down” at this point, but I was very reflective and contemplative about the trip and about my life as a whole. We reached a point on our walk where we were on a hill overlooking our city. We sat up there for probably a half hour, not even talking to one another, just looking out over the trees and the houses here and there. I wanted to have a way to just transcribe all my thoughts into words and have it forever, but I knew that like everything else, this would fade.

At 3:00 we both decided that we needed some real food. We walked home, and by the time we were there, we were both 100% baseline. I drove to a local tavern and we ate wings and drank beer. Little brother ate a burger. I started writing this, and that brings us to now.

Before I end, I want to give this timeline:

(min0-10): no effect——(min 10-60): tremors, bit of anxiety, coming up heavy——-(min 60-90): Everything was amazing, some of the most happiness I’ve ever experienced——(hour 1.5-2.5): Tripping extremely hard, difficult to hold it together, very intense——(Hour 2.5-2.75): ate rice and started coming down——(hour 3) 50% down——(hour 4): 90% down——(Hour 5): 100% down, just feeling “afterglow.”

We intend to trip again next weekend out in nature. Probably a smaller dose than this week but a higher dose than last. A trip report will accompany the journey.

the guy who does it, and then the guy who talks about it.. and you are both. good man.

will be interesting to read next week's details. what a great thing to take your brother along in the endeavor to have your back, and have his.

Do not belittle yourself. You are much more important than you seem to know.

Do not forget the butterfly effect. The fact that you are "right here, right now", is enormously important. Your very presence, whether you do anything that you or others would consider "important", is affecting the entire world around you. Every move you make, every word you say, is causing ripples around you. But that's just you doing nothing. :-)