JohnDoe_2012
Neurotransmetteur
- Inscrit
- 13 Juil 2008
- Messages
- 64
Never posted here before so bear with me as I've got a lot bottled up.
After reading a lot of posts it sounds like there are some knowledgable trippers around here so I could really use some help as you'll see if you can get to the bottom of this (thanks in advance for reading) I've segmented it so hopefully if you can't read a wall of text you can come back to it.
Ok I'm in my mid 20s, employed and an intelligent well read human I'd like to think. I'm also not someone who suffers from anxiety attacks or lacks confidence in their own mind/ability. Before I'd ever even tried a psychedelic I became interested in the work of Terence Mckenna, and like a lot of you I imagine, I've read all his books and listened to many many hours of his audio lectures. Naturally all this research and the pleasant surprise of finding someone with so many interesting ideas relating to mushrooms I started to experiment. So far I've taken 5 trips, which must seem like barely anything based on some of the experiences I've read but I'll explain why I'm already at a crossroads where I don't know if I can use mushrooms again.
I'll try to not ramble and include unimportant info but here's a basic layout of what has happened so far:
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* 1st trip - 35g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while on holiday. Took them about 2pm on a normal kind of day, alone in my hotel room. Tried using the lights out but not much was happening so I mainly had the lights on. I had eaten my lunch maybe an hour before taking them too (even tho I knew the advice about an empty stomach)
My first time was wonderful, I felt amazing inside like I was filled with light and I saw some very basic hallucinations on paintings on walls etc. Spent my time listening to music and thinking. The only negative of this trip was that the mushrooms didn't seem to have the kind of extreme effect Mckenna described (being able to talk to it and have it respond etc), though I'm aware I took less than his 'heroic dose'. But that aside this was basically a 100% positive experience and left me thinking I was going to experiment more with mushrooms.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 8
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 0
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* 2nd trip - 50g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while on another holiday, a month or two after the 1st trip. Took them about 2pm on an average day with the lights off the whole time and the curtains drawn. I hadn't eaten for a few hours and I had a ham sandwhich ready to eat once the trip was done.
Since my first trip was a success and my inspiration for discovering mushrooms had been the work of Mckenna I felt like I should try a 'heroic dose' in the hopes of having an experience along the lines of his which sounded very appealing. This time was good, not as amazing as before mainly because I kind of lost some time during it. As in I can't remember a lot of the peak time and what happened/what I was thinking. Regardless this seemed to be another good trip and I felt fine. From what I CAN remember I had close-eye visuals but they were mainly kaleidoscopic pattern changing type things. In terms of thoughts I did have some profound ones which left me feeling like the universe is one big organism and so whether we live or die it's not important, that's only a worry when your ego is in full effect. At the time it didn't feel sad at all, I looked at my life and the lives of my friends and family and I didn't worry about 'is there an afterlife' or 'what will happen to us'. It felt like when we died we'd just fertilize the Earth like dead leaves falling off a tree. The next day these same thoughts left me feeling a bit low, I felt like I wanted to be a better person to everyone I know in my life. By the next day my mood was normal and I went about my holiday as normal.
Since I was expecting to blast off into hyperspace and had taken the dose I'd heard about when I didn't get that kind of experience I foolishly had the notion: 'maybe I have a very high tolerance for these mushrooms in comparison to other people' I realise how stupid that sounds for a 2nd trip but with some things in life you can only learn as you go.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 6
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 0
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* 3rd trip - 60g Fresh Mckennai from a headshop in the Netherlands while on another holiday. About 4-5 months after the 2nd trip. Took them around 4pm on the day of my arrival, hadn't eaten for a couple of hours and had food waiting for after the trip.
With my idea of having a tolerance to the mushroom, a desire to go deeper into Terence-type realms and another holiday I decided to try a stronger trip yet again, everything so far hadn't even hinted anything negative could happen so I wasn't worried. In fact talking to acquaintances/reading online (I've done a lot of online reading, though I imagine I've forgotten a lot which didn't seem applicable at the time) they would talk about 'bad trips' or 'negative experiences' and all of that seemed totally alien to me. I figured they just weren't the kind of people who should take mushrooms, or hadn't heeded advice on dose, set and setting.
While lining up to buy some Cubensis I saw "Mckennai" listed next to them. I talked to the shopkeeper for a little bit and she said the Mckennai were stronger than just plain Cubensis and were some kind of mix with Columbians (least I think she said Columbians) She also said based on my other trips this would definitely get me 'out there' as it were, which at the time seemed like the only thing to worry about. When I got back to my hotel I took them and got into the same kind of scenario as for trip #2: in a cosy bed with music on hand till things got going and the lights out.
This is where my experience with mushrooms goes from being utterly fascinated/adoring them to becoming confused about them in a lot of regards. After taking the full dose and relaxing/listening to a little music all I remember is suddenly snapping awake, like I'd been asleep (which is possible as you'll see later) and I was in some kind of nightmare world.
I know it's tough to describe these experiences so don't confuse 'nightmare world' with meaning when I opened my eyes I was actually in some kind of other dimension. I opened my eyes and I was still in my hotel room just due to the mushrooms my mind was constantly running with ideas and I wasn't much in control. When I say ideas I'm not talking nice ideas unfortunately. I was having a terrible experience as I basically had kind of an apocalyptic/cosmic nightmare. I felt like some kind of malicious beings were running the world behind everything and their plans were just cycling up to full speed. No matter what I did or anyone else we were going to be enslaved and I got these horrible thoughts that while on mushrooms my mind kind of fed into the malicious aliens/beings along with everyone else who was taking them. Suddenly Amsterdam, one of the nicest cities in the world, felt like a hell zone where we were all going and thinking we were taking drugs to have fun/achieve something spiritually but really these aliens were in control. I had this horrible feeling that while I was supposedly in a normal hotel room the part of my mind I couldn't control was being raped/forced to know terrible things. I thought to smoke some cannabis hoping it would take things in a different direction but I couldn't even bring myself to smoke it, every thought towards weed resulted in this bizarre nightmarish though that weed was part of the enslavement and it hurt me to use it. The horrible thoughts in my mind basically felt realer than the hotel room and so I basically had a nasty time for a few hours. I've read some hair-raising trip reports where people end up in the emergency room or doing something stupid but this wasn't like that. I stayed in my bed or went to the bathroom and I wasn't going to do anything despite how bad it was. At one point I got some wierd though my friend was trying to call my cell phone and so I called him at around 7pm (3 hours after dosing) but he told he hadn't and I quickly ended the conversation without saying anything about what I was doing. Despite how terrible this was an how powerless I felt I didn't think to ask anyone for help or do anything. Instead thanks to my research I knew it was going to end in a few hours, I just put up with a bad time till then. Even if I tried to think of something I like my mind would instantly use what I thought of and kind of weave it back into the nightmarish theme. The main theme to this whole trip seemed to be domination and the thing which had that power abusing it on whoever was in its grasp. The only time I really thought about my own life I would think that I might be like this forever and unable to even get home and my parents would be so hurt to know I'd fucked myself up. I know how stupid that sounds and a part of me knew it wasn't at all true too. Then again I'd never been like this so I was scared.
One other point I need to add here is that when I 'snapped awake' and found myself in this terrible situation I had this very sharp sensation in the left of my body which seemed to hurt. I would stay the stomach but it felt further over and a bit lower to the left. At the time I thought maybe I needed the toilet or needed to drink some water so I did both a few times over the next few hours but it didn't help me at all. The next day I felt kind of down but mainly cos I'd had the shit scared out of me I assume.
Once I got home my mood returned to normal so that after a couple of months I had decided my mushroom experiments weren't over. Even though I would never ever want to have that 3rd trip again I felt like I knew the reasons why it had happened. My thoughts were: I took too much, a different strain I know nothing about as opposed to Cubensis and I'd taken them after a busy day of travelling where my flight had been cancelled so I was more worn down than normal by I got to my hotel w/ the shrooms. All sounds like an idiotic scenario to take a drug in I know but up to now all I knew experientially about shrooms was they made you feel great and relaxed you. I was so confident these reasons made sense I even told one of my friends with bad trip experience that I still thought they only occured when people disobeyed the dose, set and settings advice.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-3 at first then 0 once it went bad
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 10
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* 4th trip - 35g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while staying for the Summer. Took them about 2 months after the 3rd trip, the terrible one. Took them in a dark room and laid in my bed, I think I'd eaten maybe 2 hours before.
In line with my ideas after the 3rd trip about only using Cubensis and a dose I was familiar with etc I really felt like that bad trip was a one off and now I'd learned what I'd done wrong things would be great as in the first trips. I had waited a week or two into my Summer stay to take them and aside from taking them on the same night as travelling by train to get them I thought I had followed the basic set, setting, dose guidelines. I was ready to have a nice experience.
For the first 2 hours things were fine, I had the 1 hour 30 min or so of expectation feeling in my stomach and the first hallucinations/visuals were good. Then somewhere along things went bad again, it's at this point in the trips I always have trouble remember for some reason. What ever happened between feeling good/initial hallucination and there it had me in a scenario similar to the 3rd trip, the nightmarish one. While looking back I'd say it wasn't as bad as the 3rd trip I had some similarities. When I thought of smoking some weed the EXACT same bad feeling/group of nonsensical but sinister thoughts occured about it hurting me and helping to enslave me. My problem in this trip seems to be that when all this terrible stuff started happening I felt like I couldn't just stay in my bed and put up with it. I started moving around my apartment. For the first time in a trip I had significant visual halluciantions with eyes open, it's like I could see and find anything I wanted but my vision was kind of made of triangles or pixelated a bit. For some reason in these bad trips I always feel like drinking water should help me but when I drink it I get no relief from my state of mind. I would go to the toilet 2-3 times during the trip and everytime once I was finished pissing I still felt like there was something bad inside my body I couldn't get out, that pissing should have gotten read of.
It wasn't that I had the sharp painful sensation but once again something inside my body felt bad. I would try and go lie down on the bed but after 2-3 minutes I still felt terrible. It was that kind of terrible you may have experienced when you are ill and you feel a bad feeling so your body tells you to move around, even though it doesn't really help. It's like your body is trying to keep distracting you even if only for a second. So I'm moving around my room every 5 minutes and thinking fucked up things while doing it. I turned on the lights because I seemed to be able to concentrate on the 'real world' more when I did, though my mind was still in the control of the mushroom and whether I gave it full attention nor not would give me w/e images it pleased. At one point when I went into my kitchen (which is shared with someone else who has an apartment on my floor) I had this crazy sensation that it wouldn't matter if I went into my neighbours room through his kitchen door since he didn't exist or wasn't there, he felt like a figment of my imagination. This makes no sense since I knew he would be in there as normal. I didn't go in since like I said I always somehow can maintain enough understanding that I'm also in reality to not do some crazy shit.
My brain felt terrible and my body matched it. I didn't even feel human or like me which scared me in ways it never had in my good trips. Maybe 3/4 of the way into the trip I suddenly leapt off my bed and threw up the entire contents of my stomach into my suitcase. Don't ask me why I'd throw up there, it was close and I just did. Based on what I saw the sick was basically 90-95% as one would expect partly digested mushrooms to be, no signs that I hadn't fasted enough or anything.
This trip left me mentally and physically exhausted and after maybe an hour of trying to ignore negative thoughts (can't remember as many specifics as the 3rd trip in terms of the thoughts but they scared me and made me feel negatively) I managed to fall asleep. When I woke up I don't actually remember the day after being as bad as the 3rd trip, though I smoked a lot of cannabis this day and tried to distract myself and replenish in food/liquids to get back to normal.
At this point I felt like I just wanted to forget about that bad mushroom trip, I think this might have been the first time I decided not to do them again. The 3rd trip had been so horrible that at the time I'd thought 'never again' but then a few weeks of reading up and thinking about my experiences made me think I could change things. After this trip I thought 'there is no point continuing with these kind of experiments, you'd had two of the worst experiences of your life' Nevertheless a few weeks went by, I thought maybe I'd eaten too soon/much/something bad before the trip. I thought perhaps I just needed to adhere to the set, setting and dose stuff 100% since clearly I was far from impervious to them and needed to rethink my approach. It wasn't that I hadn't respected them before or hadn't been doing them for the right reasons, it's more than my streak of luck on the first trips made it feel like bad trips just wouldn't happen if I felt good going into them.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-3 for first 2 hours then 0
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 10 (I feel stupid even writing 10 since it wasn't 100% as bad as the 3rd trip, but in a bad trip where horrible things are happening it seems like they are all 10s)
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* 5th trip - 15-20g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while staying for the Summer. Took them about 2-3 weeks after the 4th trip, my second bad experience. Took them in a dark room and laid in my bed, from what I can remember I at least thought I'd gone a couple of hours without food.
Ok so this is my last trip and it's 2 days behind me now. The thought of doing mushrooms again had snuck back into my mind over the week before. I have mild asperger's syndrome so when I get interested in something like Mckenna or psychedelics I read everything I can about them and think about them in relation to all kinds of things. With my hope that there was still one or two things I could tweak to get a good experience I went down and bought a single box of Cubensis. My original plan had been to just take half the box (which in this case was only 30g unlike the 35g I see most places) and I figured this would mean I could just see some hallucinations and get myself kind of primed to take more in the future. I basically thought this would be like putting training wheels on a bike so I didn't keep falling off. Maybe it was the dose but I decided to take it only an hour after getting home, around 10pm. Looking back now I see it was stupid to take them right at the end of my day when I'd done a number of things. Still I felt like 'Hey I'm doing the smallest dose I've ever taken, if I just go in with a positive mindset I can have a smaller good trip and then work up to a bigger one in the future.
When I first took the mushrooms I was at my computer, just for half an hour while I ate them. When I noticed my vision on the computer was starting to be affected I decided I was going to go into the bedroom, turn out the lights and wait for the peak. Just before I got up from my computer I noticed if I looked at my reflection on the monitor screen that when I focussed on my eyes after maybe 30 seconds I could see they weren't mine or they were changing and there was some other face kind of beyond my face, like the internal halluciantion was projecting outwards. Even though this face looked kind of evil/sinister at the time I was early in the mushroom trip and this didn't worry/scare me at all. I went into my room and lay down and listened to some music. Again the first visuals/closed-eye hallucinations were good and increasing in effect so I was enjoying myself and thinking I was going to get a good experience. I don't know if I fell asleep or what because once again I have difficulty remember exactly what happened between the feeling good part of the trip and then when I was suddenly not having a good time later.
Again I find myself feeling like I have to get up off my bed and move around. I felt like if I turned on the lights the closed-eye hallucinations wouldn't be as powerful and to some small extent that did help me a little. Still I had a very bad/ominous feeling and it seemed like the flow of images/thoughts/ideas wasn't nice/good. Maybe a better way to say that than giving vague adjectives is to say that I had reached a moment where if I could have pressed an 'exit button' and quit the trip I would have. Naturally I couldn't do that and so instead the conscious/sane part of me started to have these thoughts like 'ok you're not fully immersed in it as bad as before so just keep the light on and start doing something else to distract yourself till the trip ends'. I went and looked at the time and it was about 1.5-2 hours after I had dosed. For some reason I didn't want to leave my computer, I kept sitting there looking at the clock and hoping it would change. I had the horrible compulsion to want to keep moving as I mentioned in the prior trip and so I kept bouncing my knees and watching the clock. Being in mushroom time a single minute took about 5 minutes to go by. I felt like I had to just distract or occupy myself for a couple of hours till the peak ended, then I felt like I would be able to sleep. I spent an hour looking at websites and trying to watch different things though I couldn't stay on one thing for very long. At one point I thought 'this is a low dose in comparison to the others, try things you remember from talks/reading to help' so I began humming quietly and trying to think of simple jokes. The humming would work but it felt like it would work for a single second then whatever was bad returned, I kept this cycle up for about 10 minutes. The same went for the jokes except I couldn't even get through many of them, some really obvious ones helped a second but some which in normal reality seem harmless suddenly seemed sinister. The worst thing about this trip was the fact I was kind of fighting against it for a couple of hours, like I said I've done the reading and had experiences so at the time I felt like 'ok think of something nice, or try and direct it in a good direct. sing or hum like people suggest' Thing is this wasn't working for me, I couldn't let go cos the bad part of the trip was kind of painful to my body (maybe the nausea of sickness but still something felt wrong) or on an emotional/psychic level. I just couldn't stay in the bed and relax/go with it.
3.5 hours after taking the shrooms I felt myself about to vomit so this time I caught it all in an clean empty cereal bowl that was on the side. The vomit filled about 3/4 of the bowl so you can draw your own conclusions from that, maybe I had eaten too soon before it but I just can't remember now - who knows. Anyway after being sick there was a slight moment where I felt like things were better, though this is common with vomitting under normal circumstances in my experience. Once that instant was gone I was back the same as before, trying to wait it out and distract myself. Finally the clock told me it had been 5 hours since I'd dosed so I felt like ok I should just get in bed and make attempts at sleep now. My brain had been feeling really worn out for the whole experience once things went bad. Like there was a mixture of the wear and tear of the bad thoughts, the puking, and resisting the badness. I felt like I wanted to sleep and get it over with but it wasn't until the 5 hour point when I could even make attempts at that, all the time up until then it felt like there was a light switch in my head permanently turned on, so I couldn't lie and drift off to sleep. Eventually from what I remember after 30 mins-1 hour I got to sleep.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-4 at first then 0 once it went bad
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 8-9 (like i said before, when it's bad it feels like it's as bad as it gets so don't take that lightly please)
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Next day I awoke feeling VERY hungry but not too amazing physically. I felt relief that I was back to normal and the bad experience was gone but this feeling soon turned from relief to more like some kind of guilt. Like I felt I was having these bad mushroom experiences which were just fucking me up and I had guilt over knowing if somehow I did go crazy or do something fucked up or die from one of those rare poisonous ones that I would done something so terrible to my loved ones. I know on a rational level most of those 'concerns' aren't too likely but on an emotional level this day (yesterday) soon turned into one of the worst of my entire life. During the middle part of the day where I was still readjusting to normal life/feeling a little relief I went online to talk to people and made some phone calls home. During all of this I was my normal self as far as the people I was contacting were concerned, still I had some kind of melancholy feeling growing in me. Now I felt terrible about the trip which had frightened me and taken me to my limit in terms of waiting it out.
I felt so low emotionally I would literally compare it with the day I had my heart broken by my girlfriend and I went into depression for half a year. That all happened years ago and I have worked past it but I can still remember how bad that emotional pain felt and what I went through the rest of that day is right up there. I tried to watch some 'good wholesome fun' type tv to distract myself but I couldn't and instead I spent the day reading up on bad trips, maybe hoping there was some secret I'd missed as stupid as that sounds. There was also the feeling like I can never eat those mushrooms again, in fact while I had been using my computer while dosed I'd left a .txt file open telling myself I must NEVER take them again, that all that mattered was never feeling that terrible feeling. I kept trying to think of things to turn my day around: I ate lots of healthy food like fruit instead of the junk I normally eat. I ate a bacon and egg sandwhich hoping my low feeling was just a 'protein debt' as Mckenna would put it. By the evening time got around my emotional low had gotten to rock bottom, I felt like anything I had an interest in which was non-mainstream was contributing to me being in this scenario. I felt like from that moment on I should abandon any interest in 'outsider' topics or drugs and just try and live a 'normal' life like out of a tv advert or something, just good wholesome living. That is all bizarre as it is being as I'm very much a fringe dweller in terms of interests/pursuits. Anyway I tried smoking a little bit of cannabis with the hopes it would clear/cloud my mind and I could watch a little tv or eat some more and get past my feelings. I figured another night's sleep and these feelings will go.
Whether it was a contributing factor or part of the low I felt like my life wasn't in a good place. Despite being perfectly happy spending time by myself all hours of the day I suddenly felt VERY lonely and homesick. I wanted to just get on a plane and fly home and see my parents and hug them. I'm really not an emotional person like that normally either. These thoughts just continued to escalate, maybe thanks to the one small hit of hash - I don't know, but I was soon crying my eyes out. I mean literally weeping as hard as I could, all I could think about was how lonely I was and how much distance seperated me from my family. I had the rest of the Summer in the Netherlands so I couldn't just waste money and fly home now, I still had my place and under normal circumstances how would I ever explain abandoning things?
My parents are not only anti-drugs but very religious so these experiments were the kind of thing I did in secret and NEVER planned on telling anyone about. If I told my parents I knew they'd just be so hurt/worried, getting home wouldn't happen immediately anyway since I am in another country and also it really wouldn't do anything. These thoughts/feelings are irrational as emotions often are so even if I tried to tell myself otherwise or was told otherwise by a parent it wouldn't have helped. I found the same thing during that one period of depression. I had gotten over that depression myself after 6 months and dropped the anti-depressants and essentially returned to being me only with new understanding re-integrated.
Feeling as bad as I did I began to miss one of my pets, having a beloved pet around always keeps me on an even keel or distracts me. I decided to go down to a park which had ducks and dear. It was a 20 minute walk to the park and by I was 5 minutes out of the door I was in tears again though I tried as much as I could to hold them back since I didn't want to upset the nice people walking by me. Even thinking of that moment now makes my heart hurt and I want to cry, it was just so much emotional pain. Not even just sadness or feeling down but actual anguish. I should point out due to my normal state of being I haven't made efforts to make friends here which I know probably sounds stupid to most of you, that's just the way I usually like things. When I got back home I thought back to the protein debt idea and decided to eat more fruit and another bacon and egg sandwhich. Eating them felt like a positive act but 30 minutes later I vomitted, much like I had during the trip only now 100% sober (minus a little bit of hash 1-2 hours earlier) I took a shower, knowing it would help rest me, and eventually I got off to sleep. Which brings us to today...
I really expected to wake up fresh and re-invigorated like one does once they've got back to normal after the necessary healing period. That had always been the way in the past anyway. Upon waking I did feel better, less lonely and my mental state returning to baseline. I was concerned about the fact eating some food immediately made me vomit though and so I ended up seeing the doctor. I explained the reason I had begun this cycle of sickness/diarhea and she figured it could be food poisoning so she gave me some pills and told me to keep drinking water etc.
I've made an enormous post and I know it must be a chore to read but I kept thinking up relevant information, at least to me, along the way and I didn't want to leave any confusion so people didn't understand it. My main problems now are these:
A) I still have a lingering emotional discomfort, though I'm getting over that and I will get through staying here the rest of the time, I feel like I just need to get over the sickness and get a few days or r&r under my belt. Still I've never gone that low from essentially just shit in my head, I know one could argue that's all low/relationships are but this is literally the smallest trip I ever took and yet I'm left with this terrible emotional moment which might even rival the horror of the trip, and even typing that sounds ridiculous. Till I get over this I kind of swing between feeling back to my normal self and an emotional wreck. I know how subjective that all is but if anyone can offer any advice on this point it might be the most useful of all for me.
B) I have this mystery illness, could just be food poisoning but it seems too coincidental I get food poisoning off something which also fucks with my head and makes me feel like nothing.
C) I don't know if I can ever take mushrooms again. Hell I haven't even smoked any more hash, despite having been indulging over the past few weeks and having a history of use and experience with it. Thinking of smoking it just makes me feel bad relating to some of the things I saw/thought about my life. Were this only my 2nd or 3rd trip I'd probably DEFINITELY try them again all the same since I'd have some theory on what went wrong and I've read more experiences online to take things from. I feel like if you went into a booby-trapped chamber and saw writing on the wall telling you not to go any further, that's what that .txt on my computer felt like and even though I'm back towards feeling normal I can still remember the earnestness with which I wrote that. The whole day after I had thoughts like I wished mushrooms weren't as well known because I knew someone else was havng/going to have/has had the same kind of terrible experience and I consider myself a strong minded person who can overcome a lot so I started weeping thinking of less fortunate people. People who haven't even read or heard anything and they're so scared and don't know if they'll make it. I'm a 'good' person normally in terms of wanting people to succeed/make it in life but still this kind of extreme emotional reaction just isn't like me.
Regardless my problem is that for some reason it only takes a few days after these terrible experiences before thoughts of using mushrooms in the future reemerge. My mind thinks it has figured out what went wrong, knows from experience and research what can go right and so I feel like even though I never want to do them again now I probably will end up doing them. Like once you've got some distance you forget enough you think 'it was all just in my head, I'll be better at dealing with it next time'. All I know is when I thought that on the mushroom the last 2 times and was in the nightmare world I got the idea thrown at me that when I took mushrooms there were 2 of me: the physical and rational mind which took the mushrooms and was undamaged at all times and then the imaginative/unconscious part of my mind which was essentially being sent off into a hell dimension to be abused. If you're just the rational brain you can take them and do that again, it's like when you go out drinking and you let yourself drink at a slightly faster pace than you know you should. At the time you think who cares, but next morning you have regret. If I could remember those bad trips 100% vividely I'd probably never touch another mushroom again and try and forget all of this ever happened. Still somehow those bad memories fade and the mind starts to say 'you can do it again, next time you'll get it right'.
I've typed a lot so I know some of you might be wondering what I'm asking and to be honest I don't even know, this is just how it is and I'd really appreciate some advice. I don't have anyone I can talk to: my friends are either too superficial or inexperienced with psychedelics to understand me. the ones that have dosed don't know anything about mushrooms beyond that you put them in your mouth and see things. I feel so alone and while I feel a rational confidence that is going to fade as days go by I still feel low. Mushrooms seemed like something I would spend the rest of my life coming back to and re-exploring over time. Now I am stuck in a situation where I REALLY never want to feel that bad but I also have a suspicion that unless I 100% turned my life around to I don't know what, cos it has been going in a direction I like so far, then I'll eventually do them again because of what I've stated above.
There has to be someone out there who knows even a little how I feel. I thought about deleting this a number of times while writing it but who else can I talk to? You can't discuss real apocalyptic terror with a relative who has never even take a hit of a joint. I have no idea where I go now. I even feel bad based on just knowing what I know about other people's trips: that they have a good time or they can overcome the bad elements to make it good. It's like after all the Mckenna stuff I researched none of it matters because the mushroom affects each nervous system so differently.
What do I do?
After reading a lot of posts it sounds like there are some knowledgable trippers around here so I could really use some help as you'll see if you can get to the bottom of this (thanks in advance for reading) I've segmented it so hopefully if you can't read a wall of text you can come back to it.
Ok I'm in my mid 20s, employed and an intelligent well read human I'd like to think. I'm also not someone who suffers from anxiety attacks or lacks confidence in their own mind/ability. Before I'd ever even tried a psychedelic I became interested in the work of Terence Mckenna, and like a lot of you I imagine, I've read all his books and listened to many many hours of his audio lectures. Naturally all this research and the pleasant surprise of finding someone with so many interesting ideas relating to mushrooms I started to experiment. So far I've taken 5 trips, which must seem like barely anything based on some of the experiences I've read but I'll explain why I'm already at a crossroads where I don't know if I can use mushrooms again.
I'll try to not ramble and include unimportant info but here's a basic layout of what has happened so far:
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* 1st trip - 35g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while on holiday. Took them about 2pm on a normal kind of day, alone in my hotel room. Tried using the lights out but not much was happening so I mainly had the lights on. I had eaten my lunch maybe an hour before taking them too (even tho I knew the advice about an empty stomach)
My first time was wonderful, I felt amazing inside like I was filled with light and I saw some very basic hallucinations on paintings on walls etc. Spent my time listening to music and thinking. The only negative of this trip was that the mushrooms didn't seem to have the kind of extreme effect Mckenna described (being able to talk to it and have it respond etc), though I'm aware I took less than his 'heroic dose'. But that aside this was basically a 100% positive experience and left me thinking I was going to experiment more with mushrooms.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 8
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 0
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* 2nd trip - 50g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while on another holiday, a month or two after the 1st trip. Took them about 2pm on an average day with the lights off the whole time and the curtains drawn. I hadn't eaten for a few hours and I had a ham sandwhich ready to eat once the trip was done.
Since my first trip was a success and my inspiration for discovering mushrooms had been the work of Mckenna I felt like I should try a 'heroic dose' in the hopes of having an experience along the lines of his which sounded very appealing. This time was good, not as amazing as before mainly because I kind of lost some time during it. As in I can't remember a lot of the peak time and what happened/what I was thinking. Regardless this seemed to be another good trip and I felt fine. From what I CAN remember I had close-eye visuals but they were mainly kaleidoscopic pattern changing type things. In terms of thoughts I did have some profound ones which left me feeling like the universe is one big organism and so whether we live or die it's not important, that's only a worry when your ego is in full effect. At the time it didn't feel sad at all, I looked at my life and the lives of my friends and family and I didn't worry about 'is there an afterlife' or 'what will happen to us'. It felt like when we died we'd just fertilize the Earth like dead leaves falling off a tree. The next day these same thoughts left me feeling a bit low, I felt like I wanted to be a better person to everyone I know in my life. By the next day my mood was normal and I went about my holiday as normal.
Since I was expecting to blast off into hyperspace and had taken the dose I'd heard about when I didn't get that kind of experience I foolishly had the notion: 'maybe I have a very high tolerance for these mushrooms in comparison to other people' I realise how stupid that sounds for a 2nd trip but with some things in life you can only learn as you go.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 6
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 0
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* 3rd trip - 60g Fresh Mckennai from a headshop in the Netherlands while on another holiday. About 4-5 months after the 2nd trip. Took them around 4pm on the day of my arrival, hadn't eaten for a couple of hours and had food waiting for after the trip.
With my idea of having a tolerance to the mushroom, a desire to go deeper into Terence-type realms and another holiday I decided to try a stronger trip yet again, everything so far hadn't even hinted anything negative could happen so I wasn't worried. In fact talking to acquaintances/reading online (I've done a lot of online reading, though I imagine I've forgotten a lot which didn't seem applicable at the time) they would talk about 'bad trips' or 'negative experiences' and all of that seemed totally alien to me. I figured they just weren't the kind of people who should take mushrooms, or hadn't heeded advice on dose, set and setting.
While lining up to buy some Cubensis I saw "Mckennai" listed next to them. I talked to the shopkeeper for a little bit and she said the Mckennai were stronger than just plain Cubensis and were some kind of mix with Columbians (least I think she said Columbians) She also said based on my other trips this would definitely get me 'out there' as it were, which at the time seemed like the only thing to worry about. When I got back to my hotel I took them and got into the same kind of scenario as for trip #2: in a cosy bed with music on hand till things got going and the lights out.
This is where my experience with mushrooms goes from being utterly fascinated/adoring them to becoming confused about them in a lot of regards. After taking the full dose and relaxing/listening to a little music all I remember is suddenly snapping awake, like I'd been asleep (which is possible as you'll see later) and I was in some kind of nightmare world.
I know it's tough to describe these experiences so don't confuse 'nightmare world' with meaning when I opened my eyes I was actually in some kind of other dimension. I opened my eyes and I was still in my hotel room just due to the mushrooms my mind was constantly running with ideas and I wasn't much in control. When I say ideas I'm not talking nice ideas unfortunately. I was having a terrible experience as I basically had kind of an apocalyptic/cosmic nightmare. I felt like some kind of malicious beings were running the world behind everything and their plans were just cycling up to full speed. No matter what I did or anyone else we were going to be enslaved and I got these horrible thoughts that while on mushrooms my mind kind of fed into the malicious aliens/beings along with everyone else who was taking them. Suddenly Amsterdam, one of the nicest cities in the world, felt like a hell zone where we were all going and thinking we were taking drugs to have fun/achieve something spiritually but really these aliens were in control. I had this horrible feeling that while I was supposedly in a normal hotel room the part of my mind I couldn't control was being raped/forced to know terrible things. I thought to smoke some cannabis hoping it would take things in a different direction but I couldn't even bring myself to smoke it, every thought towards weed resulted in this bizarre nightmarish though that weed was part of the enslavement and it hurt me to use it. The horrible thoughts in my mind basically felt realer than the hotel room and so I basically had a nasty time for a few hours. I've read some hair-raising trip reports where people end up in the emergency room or doing something stupid but this wasn't like that. I stayed in my bed or went to the bathroom and I wasn't going to do anything despite how bad it was. At one point I got some wierd though my friend was trying to call my cell phone and so I called him at around 7pm (3 hours after dosing) but he told he hadn't and I quickly ended the conversation without saying anything about what I was doing. Despite how terrible this was an how powerless I felt I didn't think to ask anyone for help or do anything. Instead thanks to my research I knew it was going to end in a few hours, I just put up with a bad time till then. Even if I tried to think of something I like my mind would instantly use what I thought of and kind of weave it back into the nightmarish theme. The main theme to this whole trip seemed to be domination and the thing which had that power abusing it on whoever was in its grasp. The only time I really thought about my own life I would think that I might be like this forever and unable to even get home and my parents would be so hurt to know I'd fucked myself up. I know how stupid that sounds and a part of me knew it wasn't at all true too. Then again I'd never been like this so I was scared.
One other point I need to add here is that when I 'snapped awake' and found myself in this terrible situation I had this very sharp sensation in the left of my body which seemed to hurt. I would stay the stomach but it felt further over and a bit lower to the left. At the time I thought maybe I needed the toilet or needed to drink some water so I did both a few times over the next few hours but it didn't help me at all. The next day I felt kind of down but mainly cos I'd had the shit scared out of me I assume.
Once I got home my mood returned to normal so that after a couple of months I had decided my mushroom experiments weren't over. Even though I would never ever want to have that 3rd trip again I felt like I knew the reasons why it had happened. My thoughts were: I took too much, a different strain I know nothing about as opposed to Cubensis and I'd taken them after a busy day of travelling where my flight had been cancelled so I was more worn down than normal by I got to my hotel w/ the shrooms. All sounds like an idiotic scenario to take a drug in I know but up to now all I knew experientially about shrooms was they made you feel great and relaxed you. I was so confident these reasons made sense I even told one of my friends with bad trip experience that I still thought they only occured when people disobeyed the dose, set and settings advice.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-3 at first then 0 once it went bad
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 10
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* 4th trip - 35g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while staying for the Summer. Took them about 2 months after the 3rd trip, the terrible one. Took them in a dark room and laid in my bed, I think I'd eaten maybe 2 hours before.
In line with my ideas after the 3rd trip about only using Cubensis and a dose I was familiar with etc I really felt like that bad trip was a one off and now I'd learned what I'd done wrong things would be great as in the first trips. I had waited a week or two into my Summer stay to take them and aside from taking them on the same night as travelling by train to get them I thought I had followed the basic set, setting, dose guidelines. I was ready to have a nice experience.
For the first 2 hours things were fine, I had the 1 hour 30 min or so of expectation feeling in my stomach and the first hallucinations/visuals were good. Then somewhere along things went bad again, it's at this point in the trips I always have trouble remember for some reason. What ever happened between feeling good/initial hallucination and there it had me in a scenario similar to the 3rd trip, the nightmarish one. While looking back I'd say it wasn't as bad as the 3rd trip I had some similarities. When I thought of smoking some weed the EXACT same bad feeling/group of nonsensical but sinister thoughts occured about it hurting me and helping to enslave me. My problem in this trip seems to be that when all this terrible stuff started happening I felt like I couldn't just stay in my bed and put up with it. I started moving around my apartment. For the first time in a trip I had significant visual halluciantions with eyes open, it's like I could see and find anything I wanted but my vision was kind of made of triangles or pixelated a bit. For some reason in these bad trips I always feel like drinking water should help me but when I drink it I get no relief from my state of mind. I would go to the toilet 2-3 times during the trip and everytime once I was finished pissing I still felt like there was something bad inside my body I couldn't get out, that pissing should have gotten read of.
It wasn't that I had the sharp painful sensation but once again something inside my body felt bad. I would try and go lie down on the bed but after 2-3 minutes I still felt terrible. It was that kind of terrible you may have experienced when you are ill and you feel a bad feeling so your body tells you to move around, even though it doesn't really help. It's like your body is trying to keep distracting you even if only for a second. So I'm moving around my room every 5 minutes and thinking fucked up things while doing it. I turned on the lights because I seemed to be able to concentrate on the 'real world' more when I did, though my mind was still in the control of the mushroom and whether I gave it full attention nor not would give me w/e images it pleased. At one point when I went into my kitchen (which is shared with someone else who has an apartment on my floor) I had this crazy sensation that it wouldn't matter if I went into my neighbours room through his kitchen door since he didn't exist or wasn't there, he felt like a figment of my imagination. This makes no sense since I knew he would be in there as normal. I didn't go in since like I said I always somehow can maintain enough understanding that I'm also in reality to not do some crazy shit.
My brain felt terrible and my body matched it. I didn't even feel human or like me which scared me in ways it never had in my good trips. Maybe 3/4 of the way into the trip I suddenly leapt off my bed and threw up the entire contents of my stomach into my suitcase. Don't ask me why I'd throw up there, it was close and I just did. Based on what I saw the sick was basically 90-95% as one would expect partly digested mushrooms to be, no signs that I hadn't fasted enough or anything.
This trip left me mentally and physically exhausted and after maybe an hour of trying to ignore negative thoughts (can't remember as many specifics as the 3rd trip in terms of the thoughts but they scared me and made me feel negatively) I managed to fall asleep. When I woke up I don't actually remember the day after being as bad as the 3rd trip, though I smoked a lot of cannabis this day and tried to distract myself and replenish in food/liquids to get back to normal.
At this point I felt like I just wanted to forget about that bad mushroom trip, I think this might have been the first time I decided not to do them again. The 3rd trip had been so horrible that at the time I'd thought 'never again' but then a few weeks of reading up and thinking about my experiences made me think I could change things. After this trip I thought 'there is no point continuing with these kind of experiments, you'd had two of the worst experiences of your life' Nevertheless a few weeks went by, I thought maybe I'd eaten too soon/much/something bad before the trip. I thought perhaps I just needed to adhere to the set, setting and dose stuff 100% since clearly I was far from impervious to them and needed to rethink my approach. It wasn't that I hadn't respected them before or hadn't been doing them for the right reasons, it's more than my streak of luck on the first trips made it feel like bad trips just wouldn't happen if I felt good going into them.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-3 for first 2 hours then 0
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 10 (I feel stupid even writing 10 since it wasn't 100% as bad as the 3rd trip, but in a bad trip where horrible things are happening it seems like they are all 10s)
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* 5th trip - 15-20g Fresh Cubensis (Mexican) from a headshop in the Netherlands while staying for the Summer. Took them about 2-3 weeks after the 4th trip, my second bad experience. Took them in a dark room and laid in my bed, from what I can remember I at least thought I'd gone a couple of hours without food.
Ok so this is my last trip and it's 2 days behind me now. The thought of doing mushrooms again had snuck back into my mind over the week before. I have mild asperger's syndrome so when I get interested in something like Mckenna or psychedelics I read everything I can about them and think about them in relation to all kinds of things. With my hope that there was still one or two things I could tweak to get a good experience I went down and bought a single box of Cubensis. My original plan had been to just take half the box (which in this case was only 30g unlike the 35g I see most places) and I figured this would mean I could just see some hallucinations and get myself kind of primed to take more in the future. I basically thought this would be like putting training wheels on a bike so I didn't keep falling off. Maybe it was the dose but I decided to take it only an hour after getting home, around 10pm. Looking back now I see it was stupid to take them right at the end of my day when I'd done a number of things. Still I felt like 'Hey I'm doing the smallest dose I've ever taken, if I just go in with a positive mindset I can have a smaller good trip and then work up to a bigger one in the future.
When I first took the mushrooms I was at my computer, just for half an hour while I ate them. When I noticed my vision on the computer was starting to be affected I decided I was going to go into the bedroom, turn out the lights and wait for the peak. Just before I got up from my computer I noticed if I looked at my reflection on the monitor screen that when I focussed on my eyes after maybe 30 seconds I could see they weren't mine or they were changing and there was some other face kind of beyond my face, like the internal halluciantion was projecting outwards. Even though this face looked kind of evil/sinister at the time I was early in the mushroom trip and this didn't worry/scare me at all. I went into my room and lay down and listened to some music. Again the first visuals/closed-eye hallucinations were good and increasing in effect so I was enjoying myself and thinking I was going to get a good experience. I don't know if I fell asleep or what because once again I have difficulty remember exactly what happened between the feeling good part of the trip and then when I was suddenly not having a good time later.
Again I find myself feeling like I have to get up off my bed and move around. I felt like if I turned on the lights the closed-eye hallucinations wouldn't be as powerful and to some small extent that did help me a little. Still I had a very bad/ominous feeling and it seemed like the flow of images/thoughts/ideas wasn't nice/good. Maybe a better way to say that than giving vague adjectives is to say that I had reached a moment where if I could have pressed an 'exit button' and quit the trip I would have. Naturally I couldn't do that and so instead the conscious/sane part of me started to have these thoughts like 'ok you're not fully immersed in it as bad as before so just keep the light on and start doing something else to distract yourself till the trip ends'. I went and looked at the time and it was about 1.5-2 hours after I had dosed. For some reason I didn't want to leave my computer, I kept sitting there looking at the clock and hoping it would change. I had the horrible compulsion to want to keep moving as I mentioned in the prior trip and so I kept bouncing my knees and watching the clock. Being in mushroom time a single minute took about 5 minutes to go by. I felt like I had to just distract or occupy myself for a couple of hours till the peak ended, then I felt like I would be able to sleep. I spent an hour looking at websites and trying to watch different things though I couldn't stay on one thing for very long. At one point I thought 'this is a low dose in comparison to the others, try things you remember from talks/reading to help' so I began humming quietly and trying to think of simple jokes. The humming would work but it felt like it would work for a single second then whatever was bad returned, I kept this cycle up for about 10 minutes. The same went for the jokes except I couldn't even get through many of them, some really obvious ones helped a second but some which in normal reality seem harmless suddenly seemed sinister. The worst thing about this trip was the fact I was kind of fighting against it for a couple of hours, like I said I've done the reading and had experiences so at the time I felt like 'ok think of something nice, or try and direct it in a good direct. sing or hum like people suggest' Thing is this wasn't working for me, I couldn't let go cos the bad part of the trip was kind of painful to my body (maybe the nausea of sickness but still something felt wrong) or on an emotional/psychic level. I just couldn't stay in the bed and relax/go with it.
3.5 hours after taking the shrooms I felt myself about to vomit so this time I caught it all in an clean empty cereal bowl that was on the side. The vomit filled about 3/4 of the bowl so you can draw your own conclusions from that, maybe I had eaten too soon before it but I just can't remember now - who knows. Anyway after being sick there was a slight moment where I felt like things were better, though this is common with vomitting under normal circumstances in my experience. Once that instant was gone I was back the same as before, trying to wait it out and distract myself. Finally the clock told me it had been 5 hours since I'd dosed so I felt like ok I should just get in bed and make attempts at sleep now. My brain had been feeling really worn out for the whole experience once things went bad. Like there was a mixture of the wear and tear of the bad thoughts, the puking, and resisting the badness. I felt like I wanted to sleep and get it over with but it wasn't until the 5 hour point when I could even make attempts at that, all the time up until then it felt like there was a light switch in my head permanently turned on, so I couldn't lie and drift off to sleep. Eventually from what I remember after 30 mins-1 hour I got to sleep.
Scale of 1-10
Enjoyability: 1-4 at first then 0 once it went bad
Fear/anxiety/negativity: 8-9 (like i said before, when it's bad it feels like it's as bad as it gets so don't take that lightly please)
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Next day I awoke feeling VERY hungry but not too amazing physically. I felt relief that I was back to normal and the bad experience was gone but this feeling soon turned from relief to more like some kind of guilt. Like I felt I was having these bad mushroom experiences which were just fucking me up and I had guilt over knowing if somehow I did go crazy or do something fucked up or die from one of those rare poisonous ones that I would done something so terrible to my loved ones. I know on a rational level most of those 'concerns' aren't too likely but on an emotional level this day (yesterday) soon turned into one of the worst of my entire life. During the middle part of the day where I was still readjusting to normal life/feeling a little relief I went online to talk to people and made some phone calls home. During all of this I was my normal self as far as the people I was contacting were concerned, still I had some kind of melancholy feeling growing in me. Now I felt terrible about the trip which had frightened me and taken me to my limit in terms of waiting it out.
I felt so low emotionally I would literally compare it with the day I had my heart broken by my girlfriend and I went into depression for half a year. That all happened years ago and I have worked past it but I can still remember how bad that emotional pain felt and what I went through the rest of that day is right up there. I tried to watch some 'good wholesome fun' type tv to distract myself but I couldn't and instead I spent the day reading up on bad trips, maybe hoping there was some secret I'd missed as stupid as that sounds. There was also the feeling like I can never eat those mushrooms again, in fact while I had been using my computer while dosed I'd left a .txt file open telling myself I must NEVER take them again, that all that mattered was never feeling that terrible feeling. I kept trying to think of things to turn my day around: I ate lots of healthy food like fruit instead of the junk I normally eat. I ate a bacon and egg sandwhich hoping my low feeling was just a 'protein debt' as Mckenna would put it. By the evening time got around my emotional low had gotten to rock bottom, I felt like anything I had an interest in which was non-mainstream was contributing to me being in this scenario. I felt like from that moment on I should abandon any interest in 'outsider' topics or drugs and just try and live a 'normal' life like out of a tv advert or something, just good wholesome living. That is all bizarre as it is being as I'm very much a fringe dweller in terms of interests/pursuits. Anyway I tried smoking a little bit of cannabis with the hopes it would clear/cloud my mind and I could watch a little tv or eat some more and get past my feelings. I figured another night's sleep and these feelings will go.
Whether it was a contributing factor or part of the low I felt like my life wasn't in a good place. Despite being perfectly happy spending time by myself all hours of the day I suddenly felt VERY lonely and homesick. I wanted to just get on a plane and fly home and see my parents and hug them. I'm really not an emotional person like that normally either. These thoughts just continued to escalate, maybe thanks to the one small hit of hash - I don't know, but I was soon crying my eyes out. I mean literally weeping as hard as I could, all I could think about was how lonely I was and how much distance seperated me from my family. I had the rest of the Summer in the Netherlands so I couldn't just waste money and fly home now, I still had my place and under normal circumstances how would I ever explain abandoning things?
My parents are not only anti-drugs but very religious so these experiments were the kind of thing I did in secret and NEVER planned on telling anyone about. If I told my parents I knew they'd just be so hurt/worried, getting home wouldn't happen immediately anyway since I am in another country and also it really wouldn't do anything. These thoughts/feelings are irrational as emotions often are so even if I tried to tell myself otherwise or was told otherwise by a parent it wouldn't have helped. I found the same thing during that one period of depression. I had gotten over that depression myself after 6 months and dropped the anti-depressants and essentially returned to being me only with new understanding re-integrated.
Feeling as bad as I did I began to miss one of my pets, having a beloved pet around always keeps me on an even keel or distracts me. I decided to go down to a park which had ducks and dear. It was a 20 minute walk to the park and by I was 5 minutes out of the door I was in tears again though I tried as much as I could to hold them back since I didn't want to upset the nice people walking by me. Even thinking of that moment now makes my heart hurt and I want to cry, it was just so much emotional pain. Not even just sadness or feeling down but actual anguish. I should point out due to my normal state of being I haven't made efforts to make friends here which I know probably sounds stupid to most of you, that's just the way I usually like things. When I got back home I thought back to the protein debt idea and decided to eat more fruit and another bacon and egg sandwhich. Eating them felt like a positive act but 30 minutes later I vomitted, much like I had during the trip only now 100% sober (minus a little bit of hash 1-2 hours earlier) I took a shower, knowing it would help rest me, and eventually I got off to sleep. Which brings us to today...
I really expected to wake up fresh and re-invigorated like one does once they've got back to normal after the necessary healing period. That had always been the way in the past anyway. Upon waking I did feel better, less lonely and my mental state returning to baseline. I was concerned about the fact eating some food immediately made me vomit though and so I ended up seeing the doctor. I explained the reason I had begun this cycle of sickness/diarhea and she figured it could be food poisoning so she gave me some pills and told me to keep drinking water etc.
I've made an enormous post and I know it must be a chore to read but I kept thinking up relevant information, at least to me, along the way and I didn't want to leave any confusion so people didn't understand it. My main problems now are these:
A) I still have a lingering emotional discomfort, though I'm getting over that and I will get through staying here the rest of the time, I feel like I just need to get over the sickness and get a few days or r&r under my belt. Still I've never gone that low from essentially just shit in my head, I know one could argue that's all low/relationships are but this is literally the smallest trip I ever took and yet I'm left with this terrible emotional moment which might even rival the horror of the trip, and even typing that sounds ridiculous. Till I get over this I kind of swing between feeling back to my normal self and an emotional wreck. I know how subjective that all is but if anyone can offer any advice on this point it might be the most useful of all for me.
B) I have this mystery illness, could just be food poisoning but it seems too coincidental I get food poisoning off something which also fucks with my head and makes me feel like nothing.
C) I don't know if I can ever take mushrooms again. Hell I haven't even smoked any more hash, despite having been indulging over the past few weeks and having a history of use and experience with it. Thinking of smoking it just makes me feel bad relating to some of the things I saw/thought about my life. Were this only my 2nd or 3rd trip I'd probably DEFINITELY try them again all the same since I'd have some theory on what went wrong and I've read more experiences online to take things from. I feel like if you went into a booby-trapped chamber and saw writing on the wall telling you not to go any further, that's what that .txt on my computer felt like and even though I'm back towards feeling normal I can still remember the earnestness with which I wrote that. The whole day after I had thoughts like I wished mushrooms weren't as well known because I knew someone else was havng/going to have/has had the same kind of terrible experience and I consider myself a strong minded person who can overcome a lot so I started weeping thinking of less fortunate people. People who haven't even read or heard anything and they're so scared and don't know if they'll make it. I'm a 'good' person normally in terms of wanting people to succeed/make it in life but still this kind of extreme emotional reaction just isn't like me.
Regardless my problem is that for some reason it only takes a few days after these terrible experiences before thoughts of using mushrooms in the future reemerge. My mind thinks it has figured out what went wrong, knows from experience and research what can go right and so I feel like even though I never want to do them again now I probably will end up doing them. Like once you've got some distance you forget enough you think 'it was all just in my head, I'll be better at dealing with it next time'. All I know is when I thought that on the mushroom the last 2 times and was in the nightmare world I got the idea thrown at me that when I took mushrooms there were 2 of me: the physical and rational mind which took the mushrooms and was undamaged at all times and then the imaginative/unconscious part of my mind which was essentially being sent off into a hell dimension to be abused. If you're just the rational brain you can take them and do that again, it's like when you go out drinking and you let yourself drink at a slightly faster pace than you know you should. At the time you think who cares, but next morning you have regret. If I could remember those bad trips 100% vividely I'd probably never touch another mushroom again and try and forget all of this ever happened. Still somehow those bad memories fade and the mind starts to say 'you can do it again, next time you'll get it right'.
I've typed a lot so I know some of you might be wondering what I'm asking and to be honest I don't even know, this is just how it is and I'd really appreciate some advice. I don't have anyone I can talk to: my friends are either too superficial or inexperienced with psychedelics to understand me. the ones that have dosed don't know anything about mushrooms beyond that you put them in your mouth and see things. I feel so alone and while I feel a rational confidence that is going to fade as days go by I still feel low. Mushrooms seemed like something I would spend the rest of my life coming back to and re-exploring over time. Now I am stuck in a situation where I REALLY never want to feel that bad but I also have a suspicion that unless I 100% turned my life around to I don't know what, cos it has been going in a direction I like so far, then I'll eventually do them again because of what I've stated above.
There has to be someone out there who knows even a little how I feel. I thought about deleting this a number of times while writing it but who else can I talk to? You can't discuss real apocalyptic terror with a relative who has never even take a hit of a joint. I have no idea where I go now. I even feel bad based on just knowing what I know about other people's trips: that they have a good time or they can overcome the bad elements to make it good. It's like after all the Mckenna stuff I researched none of it matters because the mushroom affects each nervous system so differently.
What do I do?
