I tripped DMT and Magic Mushrooms recently. Here is what happened, as I remember it.
I'll begin with shrooms, since I did these most recently. I began the trip a little bit apprehensively. Psychedelics make me nervous, and a bad trip is something I would definitely not like to experience. This wasn't helped by the fact that one of my friends, who would have been tripping otherwise, couldn't join us because of work. This meant that it would just be me and my other housemate who would be taking the shrooms. He is very weird and neurotic and likes to babble on about philosophy and politics. I think his cynicism and bleak outlook gives him a perverse sense of superiority. Normally I don't mind, but on drugs his philosophical rants can be very annoying and confusing. Still, it was a warm sunny afternoon so I went ahead and ate my shrooms. They were a little dry. I washed them down with Orange Juice.
The come-up of mushrooms seemed to me a lot faster than acid. With LSD, the come-up is very gradual. The world slowly unravels. With mushrooms, it felt like I was waiting nervously for ages with no real effect, and then suddenly I got very, very high. The first noticeable effects came after 30-50 minutes. Walls started to breathe out of the corner of my eye, my mood was enhanced, colours began to look a little 'off', and music started to sound dammmmmn fine. I think the effect of psychedelics on music and food is my favourite aspect of the drugs.
Very quickly these effects built up and up. I was losing track of time, everything was pulsating and screaming out at me to look at it, and my thoughts stopped being linear. My housemate seemed to be speaking quicker and quicker and making less and less sense, and I was getting to that point where following and participating in conversation becomes too stressful. Overwhelmed by everything that was going on, I had to tell my housemate to be quiet for a while, which he did.
To me, nature looks incredible on psychedelics, and the view out of the top floor window was incredible. Birds seemed to dart across the trees with lightning speed. Their movements seemed incredibly elegant and beautiful. I closed my eyes to see if I had any Closed Eye Visuals. Whoah. I opened my eyes again quickly because they were too much. Indescribably beautiful shapes, patterns and dimensions were rotating around my mind. It was at this point that I realised I could swim.
"Realising you can swim" is my slightly rubbish analogy. It relates to the first time I went over to the deep end of a swimming pool. I would paddle a couple of feet down the pool, and check to see if I could still stand with my head above water, then paddle down a bit further and do the same, until I put my foot down, and sank down into the water. A strange feeling of falling and panic. But then I splashed back up, and swam the rest of the way to the deep end of the pool, plunged to touch the bottom, and swam back. It doesn't matter how deep the water if you can swim.
I was staring at one of the Oak trees at the back of the house, which was fractalising. Pink clouds were dancing to music. The Magic Mushroom Spirit Goddess was dancing also, teasing me to come inside the fractal. I didn't want to. I've been inside a fractal before, and all you get is more fractal. I turned away and looked at the cupboard doors. The wood grain normally melts on acid, which looks cool, but on shrooms it was way cooler. The grain formed giant hologram legs, which slowly began to walk. Really, really, really cool. I watched them walk for a while and then tried to explain it to my housemate, because I felt like I might have been rude before when I needed him to shut up. Trying to explain things on psychedelics is so hard. The experience is so subjective, and I don't have good vocabulary.
At some point, I decided to put headphones on and shut my eyes. I felt a neon psychedelic energy charge up the headphone cable and into my head. The Mushroom Spirit communicated that if I was too scared to come out and play, she would come in. She took my on a journey backwards through space and time. By which I mean, my version of space and time, which featured a lot of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are cool. I tumbled backwards, back through prehistoric jungles and mountains, back through the history of the cosmos. I felt very nostalgic. I reached death and I was terrified, but I was determined to continue. We went past death and then?... I can't really describe what happened beyond that point. I vaguely remember gods and spirits and all sorts. Then the bad trips goblin entered by mind. He told me it was easier to imagine things and to look at others than it was to look at myself. I saw my own brain pulsating with neon psychedelic energy. I felt like I was just a soul or a consciousness trapped in a primate body. It was a seperate entity to me, and I was inside it, only using it to move around and see and sense the world. I saw myself in the third person. It was a really, really disconcerting feeling. But then I realised, or remembered, that there was nothing about myself that I didn't already know. I had seen myself in the mirror, and I was okay with that. It is what it is.
About four hours into the trip I stopped peaking. Just as quickly as I had come up, I came down. Apart from some visual afterglow, I could speak and think coherently again. All in all, it was a very fun experience. I felt a lot more like I was "on my own" than with previous psychedelic trips. Just me, and the figments of my imagination. I don't know if that's the nature of the drug, because of how I felt, or who I was with. I might try them again in a different setting and see what happens.
DMT was... insane. Very short, but a blast. Like Salvia, you have to inhale it and hold it for ages to get anything. I was already drunk and high before I did it, so I was feeling drunkenly confident about the whole thing. I inhaled that shit and saw my hand start to vibrate, and then blue flames were coming off it. Someone took the bong off me and I flopped onto my back. It felt like I was being dragged violently up through the dimensions of reality. I visualised time and space as a sort of spiral ribon falling down, and I, on my spaceship-bed was floating up. This lasted about 30 seconds, and then I reached the same room. The door to the left was on fire with crystal flames. The two lads who were standing to the left and right of me were 80ft tall guardian-spirit-things (I can't really say, since I have never seen anything like it) who had their backs to me. They were incredibly frightening. They turned to look at me, as if to say "Oh look, here's another one" It seemed that they found it funny that wasteman tripping on DMT kept arriving unanounced into their dimension. It made me very happy. The ceiling was an incredibly bright light, and I thought that the whole place looked like the gates of Valhalla, or something. Very cool.
While both these experiences were really really fun, I don't think I got that much out of them. Maybe it's because I am a year older, or because the drugs are different, but I felt that taking LSD last year had a much more profound effect on me. Neither the mushrooms nor the DMT made me want to make any drastic changes in my life. Keep trying, keep positive, and don't get too upset if things don't go well. It is what it is.
