Substance: Hillbilly Ropes Mushrooms
Dosage: somewhere around 10g
I've never done my own trip report but I've read several over on Erowid. After tonight, I decided to finally start keeping track of my own.
Unfortunately, I both have a dissociative disorder and was really fucking high at the time, so my memory is going to be shoddy. But here was the trip, as I remember it.
I returned home from my errands after dark and settled onto the couch to start eating my mushrooms, being careful to create a positive tripping environment. If I’ve learned anything from the accounts I’ve read, environment and headspace are everything on a trip.
This meant a proper meal a bit beforehand, a clean space, cozy blankets, and music. Although I usually trip with my boyfriend, he’d had a particularly intense one the last time and decided to sit this one out. He remained nearby if I needed anything and checked on me periodically, but for the first stretch of trip I was largely alone, and this was more than fine with me. Even when I’m with other people, tripping always feels like a deeply intimate moment with myself and all of my parts. I always get quiet and introspective.
I slipped on my over-the-ear headphones and booted up some floaty, ethereal music, before laying back and closing my eyes.
A lot of people focus on the visuals with shrooms. And the visuals are amazing. I love them, and I wish I got them more than I do. But when I trip, it’s a very tactile experience. I feel little touches and shivers of energy run up and down and through me. This has never frightened me. Even the very first time I tripped, it didn’t feel alien– rather like returning to something before memory.
As I relaxed into the sensations, feeling a sense of myself seem to pull free from me and rest beside me, I also felt time begin to dilate and stretch. Seconds felt like minutes, and minutes like hours.
I felt a sense of some entity beside me in space, something separate and alien from me, watching. It didn’t seem to have any ill intents, it seemed receptive and almost playful. My delirious mind wondered if it was the mushrooms themselves, or maybe god. I don’t know who my mysterious trip companion is, or if it's even the same thing every time, but it feels like it is. Maybe it is really myself dissociated from myself.
I began to feel my sense of self slowly seep out and diffuse into the room around me. I felt like I was made of the whole world, and the whole world made of me. As if the couch below me, the blanket around me, and the headphones on my head were all just as much myself as my body and mind. The lines between distinct concepts blurred heavily and crossed over each other again and again in my mind. I love this part. It’s such a mindfuck.
Occasionally, tripping makes me sick to my stomach, but last night was an anomaly. I threw up three or four times through the night. After the first time, my boyfriend stuck to my side like glue, checking up on me and bringing me anything I needed. But despite the situation, I felt serenely calm. Not just calm either, but intensely, ultimately, deeply peaceful.
I remember kneeling, clutching the base of the toilet and watching it almost seem to grow and expand in my hands. The visuals came about an hour in and unfortunately didn’t stay long, and I had to enjoy it from the bathroom.
When he wandered in, I distinctly remember watching my cat’s face blend and morph. It constantly faded in and out of new shapes, each soft and blurred around the edges like a half-formed memory. People say you shouldn’t look in the mirror on shrooms, but one of my favorite things to do is stare at human faces and watch them disfigure.
The visuals on these mushrooms were much softer and slower and gentler than I’d experienced on the red boys, and lasted more briefly despite a higher dose. My first visuals were on red boys shrooms, and I remember the room around me breathing as I did, and pulsing like a heart. Those visuals were much more melty and gooey.
For a while, while I knelt on the tile, I stared at my own vomit and thought strange thoughts about god. I felt like I was dying slightly, and that I had always been dying since I was born. But I felt no fear, no pressing concern, and no belief that this was THE end of ends (which, obviously, it wasn’t).
I’m trying to recall the specifics of my thoughts, but they were half-formed, floating concepts even at the time. I was almost beyond needing words, then. I simply sat and passed concepts and feelings back and forth between myself, my parts, my body, and the entity.
I became certain that there was some kind of greater being out there, and that I had been made by it. But this was nothing like the christian god I’d been raised to believe in and eventually moved on from. This thing felt like it was just as much me as I am. I felt a deep sense of peace and certainly that in the grand scheme of things, I was doing okay, I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, and the thing was pleased with me. I also, as I often do while tripping, got a vague impression that I was, in fact, somehow (a) god. I felt that I was part of a larger being, and that there were several smaller beings that made up myself.
Tripping has always felt so deeply intimate, deeply personal, and almost loving. I’ve always had a drive to push boundaries and explore headspace, and I’m currently exploring everything from meditation to BDSM.
But the thing that always strikes me is how familiar it feels. It always feels like returning to something just beyond my memory, like some plane of existence I belonged to before this one, like some kind of odd metaphysical home.
I came down relatively quickly– I always do. By 4am, I was basically sober, done being sick, and I cuddled up to go to bed.
I love tripping and I’d love to go for it again, but my last trip needs plenty of time to settle and process, at least a week or two. I’ll come back and update this post if I remember anything else.
I wonder if anyone is reading this besides me. Hello, if you are!