Date: 25 - 26.7.26
Location: Home (South West UK)
Entheogen: Dried psilocybin mushrooms (cubes, JMF strain)
Dosage: 7 grams
Method of ingestion: Lemon tek
A little preamble, for those that are interested, this is an unashamedly lengthy record of my first ever trip, and I’m typing it up from notes I made both during the experience and immediately following my return to regular consciousness (as regular as it ever is, in any case). I’ve had some time to reflect and felt that it would be beneficial to make it public, seeing as I myself have benefitted from reading trip reports from others.
I’m in my mid-thirties and have been living an entirely sober lifestyle since I was a teenager, but over the past five or six years have been wrestling with whether or not I should take a psychedelic substance of one kind or another. I’ve been heavily involved in the occult or esoteric scene, whatever you want to call it, and have had a spiritual practice going back decades now, but have always avoided anything that could be considered “drug use.”
The issue I’d been struggling with is that no matter what I have engaged with, be it prolonged meditations, float tank sessions, yoga, retreats, rituals, whatever, nothing had really “got through” to me… It felt as if there was a hard shell, a barrier, constantly defending me from any kind of spiritual or “high strangeness” events that other people I’ve known have been able to access after periods of breathwork or mantra, rituals or whatever else.
I picture it as a roughly spherical shape, a reinforced dam sitting somewhere in the middle of my brain, locking in whatever mystical juices might threaten my perception of reality with bizarre, supernatural apparitions should a drop of it ever leak out.
Now, fantastic as that is for my ability to process our consensus reality, it really feels like a hindrance when it comes to some of the more weird and wonderful parts of my life.
Again and again I kept thinking: Well, would this do it? Would psilocybin “crack the egg,” so to speak? This question went through my mind for years, and I found myself scouring the internet, reading trip reports or listening to them on YouTube, asking friends about their experiences and so on.
Fast forward to July, I had the house to myself and didn’t know when again I might have this opportunity. I understood that some people have very outlandish responses to consuming shrooms, so I wanted to be on my own, able to have outbursts of whatever nature, to cry or to make strange utterances without the fear of possibly feeling the need to be stoic or restrained in someone else’s presence.
I spent the day of the 25th fasting, engaging in ritual (this will surely be boring or nonsensical for those not involved in esoteric ceremonial nonsense, but it involved performing The Headless Rite, among other things).
I said a kind of prayer over the mushrooms and set an intention, declaring myself open to whatever the mushrooms had to teach me, and I assured them, myself, God, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, as well as whomever or whatever else was listening, that I would try my best to integrate and act upon whatever lessons were shared with me. (I even remember thinking: If I see an entity of some kind, I hope it’s a sasquatch. That seems quite, quite ludicrous, now.)
I blitzed the dried cubes in a coffee grinder, soaked them in fresh lemon juice for about an hour, downed a couple of shots of bottled ginger, then drank the acidic, organic smelling liquid just after midnight. I’d heard that taking mushrooms could be dehydrating, so I also glugged down a litre or so of water (I would come to regret this decision, later).
A comment on the dosage, yes, seven grams is not typically (or ever) advised for someone entirely unfamiliar with psychedelics. My thought process was that I’d had so, so many spiritual “duds” in my life, that I really didn’t want to risk having an underwhelming experience, as I knew that could cause me a lot of disappointment, even depression.
Not only am I someone that finds it hard to “let go,” but I’m also overweight, so thought I should factor that into the equation as well. I had no interest in experiencing a “museum dose” or anything like that; I wanted to finally have an experience totally removed from my day to day state of consciousness. It was also in my mind that JMFs tend to be a little weaker than Golden Teachers, if what I’ve read is correct.
Anyway, I used the toilet, brushed my teeth, stripped down to my birthday suit and went upstairs with a bottle of water, some earplugs and an eye mask (yes, yes, it was all very McKenna inspired; I even had a couple of thin blankets with psychedelic patterns on them). I stood in my bedroom, performed one of my forms from a type of Qigong that I practice, and I must say, it all felt very strange indeed. I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it, but I felt somewhat dizzy, unsure on my feet.
When I would look at my phone to make notes, as I was typing the letters seemed to glow with an iridescence that I wasn’t familiar with, but I thought: Well, I’m not wearing my glasses, perhaps it’s a trick of the light. Perhaps it always glows like this when I interact with the keypad? Looking back, this was foolish, but there you go.
It was 00:32 by the time I lay down, put my phone away and pulled my eye mask down.
The rising waves of… Something; I can’t describe it, hit me very hard. I kept questioning, is something happening? Mentally I felt the same as ever, but this rising sensation in my body assured me that things were not business as usual, not at all.
I would touch my body, stretch my fingers and feel this sensation, like a warmth, perhaps, but not exactly pleasant, like my body was being inflated or otherwise filled up with waves or vibrations. I wish I could better describe how it felt; it wasn’t completely different from nausea, but I didn’t have the urge to throw up. I suppose that this is “body load.” There was a pressure in my chest, in my jaw, and I felt that my eye mask was on entirely too tight.
I fiddled about to loosen it, and told myself again and again to surrender to whatever was in store. Whatever I felt or thought, there was no turning back now, after all. The thought made me laugh, and I reclined on the veritable mountain of cushions I had piled up on the bed.
Occasionally I would reach out to the bin to my left, checking that it was within reach should I need to chunder, and I held in my right hand some Islamic prayer beads that had been gifted to me some years previously.
I kept them near me as sometimes I’ll recite affirmations or whatever, using the beads as a way to get into the flow of things, to help me relax or sometimes to drift off to sleep.
I should stress that the sensation in my body wasn’t exactly bad, it was more that I was unfamiliar with it. I had a mix of excitement, anticipation of what I might see, what I might hear, but also nerves, some anxiety. I reminded myself that whatever happened, good or bad, that it would pass, and that I had the bin close by in case I felt sick. I even set the bin just next to me, lying on the bed to my left.
There was a heavy kind of thrumming sound, a pulsing sort of vibration that seemed to be coming over me, welling up from my feet, and I just kept telling myself not to fight it, not to try to cling on and to take slow, deep breaths. Let it happen, surrender to it.
It’s impossible to say what happened next, as there was a kind of black void… Not in a literal sense, or not in a visual sense, anyway. It was as if I lost time; perhaps I fell asleep (or was knocked out), but when thoughts began to creep back, I had lost all sense of who I was or where I was situated.
In these reports, people often say that they were flying through space, but that would be a misrepresentation of what I was experiencing. It was like I had evaporated or otherwise been scraped up, my body disposed of, and now I was experiencing myself as a collection of loose, not entirely connected thoughts, or notions.
I recall not being able to make sense of what was happening, and while nothing overtly scary manifested, it was all very disorientating. Involuntarily I was reaching out my left hand, touching the bin, touching my face, my stomach, then with my right hand I would grip or fondle the beads.
It all seemed completely alien to me. When I would touch my face, it was absurdly large and spongey, not like a face at all. My nose seemed to have two comically gigantic nostrils, like I could easily snort up a basketball.
I didn’t identify these features with my own face.
It was as if I was a floating hand, probing some inanimate, fleshy mannequin that had been dumped on the ground. It didn’t occur to me that I was touching my own body.
There was almost a question of: Well, who left this here?
My thoughts weren’t nearly so ordered, but there was a notion that this thing had been deposited here, and that I had come across it.
I would occasionally place my left hand inside my mouth, feeling these huge, alien teeth, gently clamping down on my index finger. I would also grip the bin, lined with a bin liner, pull it close to me, scratch at it with my right hand, then proceed to tap it against my forehead. God knows how many times I lifted it up and tapped it against my forehead.
I don’t know why exactly I did that… I think I was running a thorough investigation.
What are these objects? What could their purpose be? Why are they here?
It probably won’t come as any surprise to those more used to these substances than myself (likely everyone reading this), but these thoughts, these movements, they became completely circular. I would check the bin, scratch it, tap it against my head, tap my stomach, check my arms, chew on my hand, and go back to checking the bin again.
I wish I could say for how long I was engaged in this examination, or that I came to some interesting conclusions, but in any case, time must have been passing.
Again and again I performed the same ritual of checking the bin, checking myself, checking the beads, and the beads themselves seemed totally incomprehensible to me. They stretched impossibly through my hands as if made of elastic, or as if the hard, plastic beads had been transformed into some kind of oily, gloopy liquid.
Suffice to say, my understanding of time had been completely shredded.
At some point I noticed that I was laughing, or indeed, someone was laughing. I was involuntarily narrating whatever came to mind, and seemed to be trying to figure out what was happening. I thought: Ahah, it was you, it was the mushrooms that did this, you have done this to me, and I would be laughing uncontrollably. The idea that some little fruits had totally and utterly scrambled my brain was very amusing to me.
The sound of my voice was alien, I found myself thinking, why does this guy sound like that? Again, at this time I wasn’t associating my voice or my laughter with myself. It was just the sound of someone’s voice, the sound of someone laughing.
I don’t think I have much of a West Country accent, but when listening to myself speak I was amused at how the “Rs” were pronounced, the sounds of the words, and the laughter, it was like it was on a tape deck, slowed down, pitch shifted. It was a deep and guttural chuckling that I was unable to make sense of, and whenever I would move my head, it sounded like thick, heavy metal girders grinding against one another.
There was a mechanical feel to it, like I was a robot, propped up in the corner, laughing about something or the other, abandoned to my own devices.
Every time I would start to grasp what was happening, that I had the culprit, those mischievous little mushrooms, I would break out into laughter and the whole process would begin again. The same “realisation” would dawn on me thousands and thousands of times.
I had read about thought loops, but never realised how literal they could be. I felt like I was trapped for aeons, looping again and again, stuck in this time warp, no body, no location, just sucked into this void where the only thing I could do was relive the same realisation, millions of times over.
I kept finding myself trying to reason with myself, saying aloud: “Look, dude… Listen, listen… Okay buddy…” and trying to sit up. I don’t know what exactly I was getting at, but the impression I have is that I was trying to “snap myself out of it.” As if I could just pull my socks up and walk it off.
I started to think: The idea that anyone would take this to have a spiritual experience is ludicrous. It was hilarious, the foolishness of it.
Despite that being my thought, all I kept saying was “the idea,” again and again and again, slowly, drawn out: “The ideeeeeaaaaa.” I felt like I’d been doing this for hours, punctuated at times by lifting up the beads to my right, turning to them and saying: “Hello” before bursting into fits of laughter again.
Part of me desperately wanted it to end, to draw this bloody loop to a close, but at the same time I was genuinely finding it very funny. It was like my consciousness had been snipped into different pieces, spread out across the room and they were following their own separate trains of thought all at once.
Part of me was in hysterics at the silliness of it all, while another was trying to get up, and another had resolved to destroy all remaining traces of any shrooms still in the house once I escaped from this prison of repeating thoughts. I felt like I had taken a crowbar to my brain.
Different aspects of my life would come into view, and I would think, who is this guy? I would have memories pass by, and it seemed impossible that I could have really experienced these things (or that “he” could have experienced these things. The thoughts and observations were very disconnected from me as a person. It was like I was examining a stranger’s memories).
I should stress that none of this was visual at all. I had my eye mask on and was going through all of this in complete darkness. I saw no shapes, no patterns, nothing of the sort. Anything I thought of just appeared in my mind’s eye, pretty much as it would any other day. There were no hallucinations, at least as I understand them from other people’s descriptions.
I’m aware that this report is already highly self-indulgent, so I’ll skip over some of the more personal details. Essentially, I was viewing all these different things that I have in fact done in my life, but in that state it was incomprehensible that any one person would have been able to do all these things (which was nice in a way, since in my regular state I tend not to feel very accomplished).
It ranged from big things, like I was thinking about how I had consecrated my prayer beads in the confluence of the rivers at the Kumbh Mela in India, and I felt totally baffled by it: You went to India.. On your own? No… No, that’s not possible, and other thoughts like this, to really small things like: You took the bus into town? A bus, alone? No, no, impossible.
Normal, day to day tasks seemed totally ludicrous, like a complete joke. The idea that I went to the gym was hilarious. I couldn’t even nearly grasp why I would want to do that (or anyone else, for that matter). You do bicep curls? No… Surely not… Why? All the normal facets that make up daily life seemed silly, pointless and comical, even absurd.
If I had to sum up the mood of the experience in one word, I would say that it was cynical, or maybe better to say that it was irreverent.
There were no overwhelming waves of love, no visions of the godhead, no opening of the gates of Heaven. Just a very powerful knowing, a knowing that all we do, everything we busy ourselves with, our routines and our notions, it’s all ludicrous.
I have often felt out of place, as if this world hasn’t really been designed with people like me in mind, that we’ve developed a society that’s not fit to live in, but detached from my normal, sober state of mind, it was no longer an inkling, it was a fact. Our social customs, our routines, our careers, our entire existence is utterly devoid of meaning. We have it all wrong.
The word “silly” went through my mind over and over again. Everything oozed silliness.
At times random things would pop into my mind, like characters from The Big Lez Show, or lists of people that I knew. Again, I found it very hard to wrap my head around how I knew all these people; it seemed highly improbable to me that any one person could really maintain relationships with all these “random people,” as they appeared to be, during the trip.
I thought of Terence McKenna, and Hamilton Morris, and just laughed and laughed. The very idea of them seemed so silly. Their thoughts, their ideals, in this state it all seemed entirely preposterous. The concept of Terence McKenna seemed silly, the notion of Hamilton Morris seemed silly.
Now, there were positive things that came out of the trip. One thing that struck me very clearly, for example, was an awareness of what my father must have suffered as his mental clarity was fading. Before he passed away at the end of 2022, he was experiencing the early stages of dementia, made worse by a stroke that ultimately took his life.
I remembered that again and again, my father, unable to speak, would shakily reach his working hand towards the edges of his bedding, gripping it tightly, twisting it, bundling it up, then he’d pull it all towards him and clutch it as hard as he could. Time and time again the nurses would readjust the covers, tuck the bedsheet back in, and time and time again he would compulsively tug at it, dragging it again towards him in an agitated fashion.
In my confused state, I started to identify more and more with him… There was a sense of continuation, that the father and the son were in an unbroken flow, more like a river than a chain, that the family tree was very literally connected, that we were one and the same. I could see him in me, like we were drawn on two sheets of acetate, one laid on top of the other.
I also understood that when he was in his mentally disturbed state, just as I was clawing at the bin, touching my face or pulling at the beads, he too must have been attempting to anchor himself, to literally get a hold on where he was, both in time and space. He was trying to make sense of what was happening to him.
There is, of course, the possibility that our experiences were very different, but that night it seemed completely clear to me that this was the case. I suppose it’s sad, knowing the confusion that he must have felt, but at that moment I didn’t feel sad. The feeling I had was just one of understanding, of acknowledgement, of feeling closer to him, having some direct experience of the kind of disoriented, drifting sensation that he must have been dealing with.
Different names came to me as I attempted to regain a sense of self. Names of family members that had also passed away. Your father is dead, your nan is dead, Huxley is dead, Karen is dead. These are all people or animals that meant a great deal to me while they were alive, I loved them very much.
It was like my brain was trying to reach out and grasp at things or people that were important to me, and to order them, to categorise them and build up a picture of who I was in relation to them.
I said to myself: This is a result of the mushrooms… You took them, and at some point this will all pass. I had no way to tell how much time had passed, and kept wanting to check, but the idea of looking at a clock, or my phone, was out of the question. Even the idea of a clock sent me into fits of laughter. How ever could a small, round device even begin to “tell the time”?
It occurred to me that these feelings, this experience, was similar in nature to the time I had become delirious as a result of a fever when I was abroad around ten years ago. The dreamlike, garbled nature of it all felt very familiar in that sense, but luckily this didn’t have the extreme paranoia that came with that bout of sickness (complete with conspiratorial visions of the CIA chasing me, the belief that my friends and family were government plants, the complete package).
I tried many times to sit upright, to prop myself up and rearrange myself, but every time I tried, it was like someone would click their fingers and I would be right back where I started. At some point I felt like I was falling forward, plummeting down through space in slow motion, then I was back in the same position, lying on the bed, looking to my left, gripping the bin. It was impossible to escape.
There were phrases that I’d use to try and ground myself: “I am in the bedroom. Emily is in New York. Foley is downstairs.” Now, all of these things were true; I was indeed in my bedroom, Emily, my girlfriend, was away in New York, and Foley, our dog, was sleeping downstairs in the living room. The only problem was that none of these things meant anything to me.
I had a vague idea as to what or who Emily was, but the words “New York” meant nothing to me at all, just that she was someone important, that they were far away, and while I knew that Foley was downstairs, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what indeed “a Foley” was. I had a strong sense that she, or it, loved me, and that she was waiting for me, but couldn’t bring to mind that she was a dog, what she looked like, or even what “downstairs” really meant, for that matter.
I kept thinking about how Julian Vayne had recommended in one of his books that if part of a trip felt uncomfortable, sometimes just changing the lighting or moving to a different location could help. I’d tried many times to move, but doubled down on removing my eye mask (which seemed to take hours and many, many attempts), and once I could see again, the trip definitely entered another phase.
I had a very faint view of a repeating pattern, like everything in my field of vision was covered with colourful, identical shapes, but I must stress that this was very faint and almost immediately faded away as my eyes adjusted to the darkened room.
Removing my ear plugs also took me some time, not so much because they were difficult to take out, but their texture kept distracting me and I’d find myself just sitting with them in my lap, absent-mindedly pinching them lightly between my fingertips for some time, before I eventually was able to discard them on the nightside table.
I tried to reach for my water bottle on the floor, only to find that the cap was unusually large, and that trying to walk my fingers from the top to the base seemed to take an incredible length of time, like the bottle had become awkwardly stretched out away from me. When I eventually located where it met the floor with my fingers, I found that it had also become alarmingly heavy, perhaps two hundred kilograms.
I quickly abandoned trying to pick it up.
At that moment, my next challenge manifested itself. It dawned on me, quite suddenly, that I needed to empty my bladder. I tried to get up but my legs wouldn’t cooperate with me. I lay back on the bed and wondered what to do. Please don’t wet the bed… I can’t wet the bed.
I tried several times to get up, realised that it was a lost cause, and tried to maneuver the small bin to a position where I could urinate into it. This was also a bewildering task.
Even when I more or less had the bin in place, my member refused to let loose. I desperately needed to go, but my genitals felt like they were made of playdough and my urethra may as well have been sealed up with superglue.
I searched around and managed to turn on the bedside lamp, and with this light source I found that I regained more control of my body. Still the waves of needing to relieve myself kept hitting me; it was painful, even, like I’d been holding it in for a long time without realising.
I practised standing up and sitting back down again. I did this several times, consciously, this time, not stuck in a loop again. I rehearsed walking the two or three steps to the bedroom door, touched the frame and went back, sitting down on the bed again. I had to be sure that I could make it without stumbling, as once the door was open, the stairs would be to my left and I didn’t want to fall down (they’re slippery devils at the best of times).
Eventually I was convinced that if I managed to get through the door, I could make it to the toilet. It was only a metre or so from the bedroom doorway, but I was incredibly relieved when I managed to push open the door and collapse onto the toilet itself, my bladder finally emptying as I sat there, hunched over, head resting against the edge of the open door.
I pulled the cord to turn the light on and realised: Oh my God… Things really do look weird. Of course this is normal for those well versed in these mind-bending states, but I found it really fascinating. Every line in my hand looked magnified, every little detail of the door, the doorknob, everything.
This was really surprising, not only because it’s strange in and of itself, but because typically my vision is incredibly poor (I had left my glasses in the bedroom). I marvelled at this for some, some time before deciding that I could return to bed.
My coordination was still very poor, every movement took a great deal of intention to carry out. I spent some time examining the hoover on the landing, which had taken on a very queer appearance, and decided to quickly look into the mirror in the bathroom and see if I looked distorted in any way.
Other than noting how dilated my pupils were, and again how “zoomed in” everything looked, otherwise things were normal enough, so I ventured back to the bedroom.
I finally decided to check the phone, and again burst into laughter when I saw that the time was 4:20 in the morning. I took a screenshot to be sure, and indeed, when I checked later, I hadn’t imagined it.
I made some notes on my phone; my hands were all distorted and the phone seemed more like an iPad, swollen and bulky, the letters still glowing as they appeared on the screen in that magical way I’d noticed earlier, though I no longer questioned it. I kept thinking that I was back to reality, then realising, no, no, you’re still utterly loaded.
I was still having a hard time telling how much time had passed. It seemed like I’d been waiting there an awfully long time, then checked my phone again to see but ten minutes had gone by.
It was clear by now that Foley was my dog, and it seemed so strange to think that I’d been having so much trouble figuring it out before. I resolved to go and see her, and very carefully made my way downstairs, clinging to the bannister in case my feet should betray me.
From this point on, the trip was very much winding down. I was very happy to see Foley, like I hadn’t seen her in some years. She looked incredibly beautiful in an almost cartoonish sort of way, her eyes practically sparkling, but her excited, quick movements were far too much for me to handle in that tired, somewhat dazed state. I managed to settle down on the sofa with her and pass out for a while.
When I woke I felt incredibly hungry, which makes sense as I hadn’t eaten the previous day, and the acid from the lemon had given me some mild discomfort in my chest. I remembered being in the midst of the experience and thinking: All this for some heartburn.
Around eight in the morning, I ate a packet of crisps, chewed down a couple of Rennies and made a huge pan full of pasta, but barely ate any of it before I fell asleep again. I did, however, manage to write down a lot of notes. Even by 9:30 my sense of time was still pretty all over the place.
I slept on and off through the morning and early afternoon; it took pretty much all of the day to really recover. I didn’t feel depressed or anything especially bad, just the kind of exhaustion that I guess comes from being up half the night in a state of confusion.
While I didn’t see any colourful geometric shapes or get to meet Jesus or anything, I really did value what happened. No, it definitely wasn’t the kind of mystical trip that I had been looking for, and I wouldn’t call the experience spiritual in any usual sense of the word, but I had very obviously been in an altered state of consciousness, and it was the most “out of my own head” that I had managed to get in years.
No waking meditation, no breathwork, no intentional technique of any kind had ever put me in a state remotely like this, so I see this as a major breakthrough. I’ve had very strange experiences in dreams, including lucid dreams, but while truly awake I’ve never managed to really switch off; this has been something liberating for me. Sometimes my mind feels like a prison.
What happens next? Well, as I type this up, it’s nearing two weeks since that first dive into the world of psilocybin, and I’m thinking well, difficult as it was, I definitely need to return sometime, to explore the mind further and maybe even beyond.
As far as dosage, well, I really don’t know. Part of me wants to try a lower dose, four or five grams, maybe, and another part of me thinks well, you were out there, but the experience was still very cerebral, introspective, so perhaps pushing it to nine or ten grams would really ensure a breakthrough into other realms. I’m plainly no Kilindi Iyi, but it was his vivid descriptions of spending hours in fantastical, DMTesque realms that really inspired me to experiment with psilocybin.
I haven’t made a decision yet, but whatever I decide, you can rest assured there will be another winding, verbose trip report once it’s done and I have again returned to my body. Thank you for bearing with me.
Choyofaque.
Location: Home (South West UK)
Entheogen: Dried psilocybin mushrooms (cubes, JMF strain)
Dosage: 7 grams
Method of ingestion: Lemon tek
A little preamble, for those that are interested, this is an unashamedly lengthy record of my first ever trip, and I’m typing it up from notes I made both during the experience and immediately following my return to regular consciousness (as regular as it ever is, in any case). I’ve had some time to reflect and felt that it would be beneficial to make it public, seeing as I myself have benefitted from reading trip reports from others.
I’m in my mid-thirties and have been living an entirely sober lifestyle since I was a teenager, but over the past five or six years have been wrestling with whether or not I should take a psychedelic substance of one kind or another. I’ve been heavily involved in the occult or esoteric scene, whatever you want to call it, and have had a spiritual practice going back decades now, but have always avoided anything that could be considered “drug use.”
The issue I’d been struggling with is that no matter what I have engaged with, be it prolonged meditations, float tank sessions, yoga, retreats, rituals, whatever, nothing had really “got through” to me… It felt as if there was a hard shell, a barrier, constantly defending me from any kind of spiritual or “high strangeness” events that other people I’ve known have been able to access after periods of breathwork or mantra, rituals or whatever else.
I picture it as a roughly spherical shape, a reinforced dam sitting somewhere in the middle of my brain, locking in whatever mystical juices might threaten my perception of reality with bizarre, supernatural apparitions should a drop of it ever leak out.
Now, fantastic as that is for my ability to process our consensus reality, it really feels like a hindrance when it comes to some of the more weird and wonderful parts of my life.
Again and again I kept thinking: Well, would this do it? Would psilocybin “crack the egg,” so to speak? This question went through my mind for years, and I found myself scouring the internet, reading trip reports or listening to them on YouTube, asking friends about their experiences and so on.
Fast forward to July, I had the house to myself and didn’t know when again I might have this opportunity. I understood that some people have very outlandish responses to consuming shrooms, so I wanted to be on my own, able to have outbursts of whatever nature, to cry or to make strange utterances without the fear of possibly feeling the need to be stoic or restrained in someone else’s presence.
I spent the day of the 25th fasting, engaging in ritual (this will surely be boring or nonsensical for those not involved in esoteric ceremonial nonsense, but it involved performing The Headless Rite, among other things).
I said a kind of prayer over the mushrooms and set an intention, declaring myself open to whatever the mushrooms had to teach me, and I assured them, myself, God, J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, as well as whomever or whatever else was listening, that I would try my best to integrate and act upon whatever lessons were shared with me. (I even remember thinking: If I see an entity of some kind, I hope it’s a sasquatch. That seems quite, quite ludicrous, now.)
I blitzed the dried cubes in a coffee grinder, soaked them in fresh lemon juice for about an hour, downed a couple of shots of bottled ginger, then drank the acidic, organic smelling liquid just after midnight. I’d heard that taking mushrooms could be dehydrating, so I also glugged down a litre or so of water (I would come to regret this decision, later).
A comment on the dosage, yes, seven grams is not typically (or ever) advised for someone entirely unfamiliar with psychedelics. My thought process was that I’d had so, so many spiritual “duds” in my life, that I really didn’t want to risk having an underwhelming experience, as I knew that could cause me a lot of disappointment, even depression.
Not only am I someone that finds it hard to “let go,” but I’m also overweight, so thought I should factor that into the equation as well. I had no interest in experiencing a “museum dose” or anything like that; I wanted to finally have an experience totally removed from my day to day state of consciousness. It was also in my mind that JMFs tend to be a little weaker than Golden Teachers, if what I’ve read is correct.
Anyway, I used the toilet, brushed my teeth, stripped down to my birthday suit and went upstairs with a bottle of water, some earplugs and an eye mask (yes, yes, it was all very McKenna inspired; I even had a couple of thin blankets with psychedelic patterns on them). I stood in my bedroom, performed one of my forms from a type of Qigong that I practice, and I must say, it all felt very strange indeed. I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining it, but I felt somewhat dizzy, unsure on my feet.
When I would look at my phone to make notes, as I was typing the letters seemed to glow with an iridescence that I wasn’t familiar with, but I thought: Well, I’m not wearing my glasses, perhaps it’s a trick of the light. Perhaps it always glows like this when I interact with the keypad? Looking back, this was foolish, but there you go.
It was 00:32 by the time I lay down, put my phone away and pulled my eye mask down.
The rising waves of… Something; I can’t describe it, hit me very hard. I kept questioning, is something happening? Mentally I felt the same as ever, but this rising sensation in my body assured me that things were not business as usual, not at all.
I would touch my body, stretch my fingers and feel this sensation, like a warmth, perhaps, but not exactly pleasant, like my body was being inflated or otherwise filled up with waves or vibrations. I wish I could better describe how it felt; it wasn’t completely different from nausea, but I didn’t have the urge to throw up. I suppose that this is “body load.” There was a pressure in my chest, in my jaw, and I felt that my eye mask was on entirely too tight.
I fiddled about to loosen it, and told myself again and again to surrender to whatever was in store. Whatever I felt or thought, there was no turning back now, after all. The thought made me laugh, and I reclined on the veritable mountain of cushions I had piled up on the bed.
Occasionally I would reach out to the bin to my left, checking that it was within reach should I need to chunder, and I held in my right hand some Islamic prayer beads that had been gifted to me some years previously.
I kept them near me as sometimes I’ll recite affirmations or whatever, using the beads as a way to get into the flow of things, to help me relax or sometimes to drift off to sleep.
I should stress that the sensation in my body wasn’t exactly bad, it was more that I was unfamiliar with it. I had a mix of excitement, anticipation of what I might see, what I might hear, but also nerves, some anxiety. I reminded myself that whatever happened, good or bad, that it would pass, and that I had the bin close by in case I felt sick. I even set the bin just next to me, lying on the bed to my left.
There was a heavy kind of thrumming sound, a pulsing sort of vibration that seemed to be coming over me, welling up from my feet, and I just kept telling myself not to fight it, not to try to cling on and to take slow, deep breaths. Let it happen, surrender to it.
It’s impossible to say what happened next, as there was a kind of black void… Not in a literal sense, or not in a visual sense, anyway. It was as if I lost time; perhaps I fell asleep (or was knocked out), but when thoughts began to creep back, I had lost all sense of who I was or where I was situated.
In these reports, people often say that they were flying through space, but that would be a misrepresentation of what I was experiencing. It was like I had evaporated or otherwise been scraped up, my body disposed of, and now I was experiencing myself as a collection of loose, not entirely connected thoughts, or notions.
I recall not being able to make sense of what was happening, and while nothing overtly scary manifested, it was all very disorientating. Involuntarily I was reaching out my left hand, touching the bin, touching my face, my stomach, then with my right hand I would grip or fondle the beads.
It all seemed completely alien to me. When I would touch my face, it was absurdly large and spongey, not like a face at all. My nose seemed to have two comically gigantic nostrils, like I could easily snort up a basketball.
I didn’t identify these features with my own face.
It was as if I was a floating hand, probing some inanimate, fleshy mannequin that had been dumped on the ground. It didn’t occur to me that I was touching my own body.
There was almost a question of: Well, who left this here?
My thoughts weren’t nearly so ordered, but there was a notion that this thing had been deposited here, and that I had come across it.
I would occasionally place my left hand inside my mouth, feeling these huge, alien teeth, gently clamping down on my index finger. I would also grip the bin, lined with a bin liner, pull it close to me, scratch at it with my right hand, then proceed to tap it against my forehead. God knows how many times I lifted it up and tapped it against my forehead.
I don’t know why exactly I did that… I think I was running a thorough investigation.
What are these objects? What could their purpose be? Why are they here?
It probably won’t come as any surprise to those more used to these substances than myself (likely everyone reading this), but these thoughts, these movements, they became completely circular. I would check the bin, scratch it, tap it against my head, tap my stomach, check my arms, chew on my hand, and go back to checking the bin again.
I wish I could say for how long I was engaged in this examination, or that I came to some interesting conclusions, but in any case, time must have been passing.
Again and again I performed the same ritual of checking the bin, checking myself, checking the beads, and the beads themselves seemed totally incomprehensible to me. They stretched impossibly through my hands as if made of elastic, or as if the hard, plastic beads had been transformed into some kind of oily, gloopy liquid.
Suffice to say, my understanding of time had been completely shredded.
At some point I noticed that I was laughing, or indeed, someone was laughing. I was involuntarily narrating whatever came to mind, and seemed to be trying to figure out what was happening. I thought: Ahah, it was you, it was the mushrooms that did this, you have done this to me, and I would be laughing uncontrollably. The idea that some little fruits had totally and utterly scrambled my brain was very amusing to me.
The sound of my voice was alien, I found myself thinking, why does this guy sound like that? Again, at this time I wasn’t associating my voice or my laughter with myself. It was just the sound of someone’s voice, the sound of someone laughing.
I don’t think I have much of a West Country accent, but when listening to myself speak I was amused at how the “Rs” were pronounced, the sounds of the words, and the laughter, it was like it was on a tape deck, slowed down, pitch shifted. It was a deep and guttural chuckling that I was unable to make sense of, and whenever I would move my head, it sounded like thick, heavy metal girders grinding against one another.
There was a mechanical feel to it, like I was a robot, propped up in the corner, laughing about something or the other, abandoned to my own devices.
Every time I would start to grasp what was happening, that I had the culprit, those mischievous little mushrooms, I would break out into laughter and the whole process would begin again. The same “realisation” would dawn on me thousands and thousands of times.
I had read about thought loops, but never realised how literal they could be. I felt like I was trapped for aeons, looping again and again, stuck in this time warp, no body, no location, just sucked into this void where the only thing I could do was relive the same realisation, millions of times over.
I kept finding myself trying to reason with myself, saying aloud: “Look, dude… Listen, listen… Okay buddy…” and trying to sit up. I don’t know what exactly I was getting at, but the impression I have is that I was trying to “snap myself out of it.” As if I could just pull my socks up and walk it off.
I started to think: The idea that anyone would take this to have a spiritual experience is ludicrous. It was hilarious, the foolishness of it.
Despite that being my thought, all I kept saying was “the idea,” again and again and again, slowly, drawn out: “The ideeeeeaaaaa.” I felt like I’d been doing this for hours, punctuated at times by lifting up the beads to my right, turning to them and saying: “Hello” before bursting into fits of laughter again.
Part of me desperately wanted it to end, to draw this bloody loop to a close, but at the same time I was genuinely finding it very funny. It was like my consciousness had been snipped into different pieces, spread out across the room and they were following their own separate trains of thought all at once.
Part of me was in hysterics at the silliness of it all, while another was trying to get up, and another had resolved to destroy all remaining traces of any shrooms still in the house once I escaped from this prison of repeating thoughts. I felt like I had taken a crowbar to my brain.
Different aspects of my life would come into view, and I would think, who is this guy? I would have memories pass by, and it seemed impossible that I could have really experienced these things (or that “he” could have experienced these things. The thoughts and observations were very disconnected from me as a person. It was like I was examining a stranger’s memories).
I should stress that none of this was visual at all. I had my eye mask on and was going through all of this in complete darkness. I saw no shapes, no patterns, nothing of the sort. Anything I thought of just appeared in my mind’s eye, pretty much as it would any other day. There were no hallucinations, at least as I understand them from other people’s descriptions.
I’m aware that this report is already highly self-indulgent, so I’ll skip over some of the more personal details. Essentially, I was viewing all these different things that I have in fact done in my life, but in that state it was incomprehensible that any one person would have been able to do all these things (which was nice in a way, since in my regular state I tend not to feel very accomplished).
It ranged from big things, like I was thinking about how I had consecrated my prayer beads in the confluence of the rivers at the Kumbh Mela in India, and I felt totally baffled by it: You went to India.. On your own? No… No, that’s not possible, and other thoughts like this, to really small things like: You took the bus into town? A bus, alone? No, no, impossible.
Normal, day to day tasks seemed totally ludicrous, like a complete joke. The idea that I went to the gym was hilarious. I couldn’t even nearly grasp why I would want to do that (or anyone else, for that matter). You do bicep curls? No… Surely not… Why? All the normal facets that make up daily life seemed silly, pointless and comical, even absurd.
If I had to sum up the mood of the experience in one word, I would say that it was cynical, or maybe better to say that it was irreverent.
There were no overwhelming waves of love, no visions of the godhead, no opening of the gates of Heaven. Just a very powerful knowing, a knowing that all we do, everything we busy ourselves with, our routines and our notions, it’s all ludicrous.
I have often felt out of place, as if this world hasn’t really been designed with people like me in mind, that we’ve developed a society that’s not fit to live in, but detached from my normal, sober state of mind, it was no longer an inkling, it was a fact. Our social customs, our routines, our careers, our entire existence is utterly devoid of meaning. We have it all wrong.
The word “silly” went through my mind over and over again. Everything oozed silliness.
At times random things would pop into my mind, like characters from The Big Lez Show, or lists of people that I knew. Again, I found it very hard to wrap my head around how I knew all these people; it seemed highly improbable to me that any one person could really maintain relationships with all these “random people,” as they appeared to be, during the trip.
I thought of Terence McKenna, and Hamilton Morris, and just laughed and laughed. The very idea of them seemed so silly. Their thoughts, their ideals, in this state it all seemed entirely preposterous. The concept of Terence McKenna seemed silly, the notion of Hamilton Morris seemed silly.
Now, there were positive things that came out of the trip. One thing that struck me very clearly, for example, was an awareness of what my father must have suffered as his mental clarity was fading. Before he passed away at the end of 2022, he was experiencing the early stages of dementia, made worse by a stroke that ultimately took his life.
I remembered that again and again, my father, unable to speak, would shakily reach his working hand towards the edges of his bedding, gripping it tightly, twisting it, bundling it up, then he’d pull it all towards him and clutch it as hard as he could. Time and time again the nurses would readjust the covers, tuck the bedsheet back in, and time and time again he would compulsively tug at it, dragging it again towards him in an agitated fashion.
In my confused state, I started to identify more and more with him… There was a sense of continuation, that the father and the son were in an unbroken flow, more like a river than a chain, that the family tree was very literally connected, that we were one and the same. I could see him in me, like we were drawn on two sheets of acetate, one laid on top of the other.
I also understood that when he was in his mentally disturbed state, just as I was clawing at the bin, touching my face or pulling at the beads, he too must have been attempting to anchor himself, to literally get a hold on where he was, both in time and space. He was trying to make sense of what was happening to him.
There is, of course, the possibility that our experiences were very different, but that night it seemed completely clear to me that this was the case. I suppose it’s sad, knowing the confusion that he must have felt, but at that moment I didn’t feel sad. The feeling I had was just one of understanding, of acknowledgement, of feeling closer to him, having some direct experience of the kind of disoriented, drifting sensation that he must have been dealing with.
Different names came to me as I attempted to regain a sense of self. Names of family members that had also passed away. Your father is dead, your nan is dead, Huxley is dead, Karen is dead. These are all people or animals that meant a great deal to me while they were alive, I loved them very much.
It was like my brain was trying to reach out and grasp at things or people that were important to me, and to order them, to categorise them and build up a picture of who I was in relation to them.
I said to myself: This is a result of the mushrooms… You took them, and at some point this will all pass. I had no way to tell how much time had passed, and kept wanting to check, but the idea of looking at a clock, or my phone, was out of the question. Even the idea of a clock sent me into fits of laughter. How ever could a small, round device even begin to “tell the time”?
It occurred to me that these feelings, this experience, was similar in nature to the time I had become delirious as a result of a fever when I was abroad around ten years ago. The dreamlike, garbled nature of it all felt very familiar in that sense, but luckily this didn’t have the extreme paranoia that came with that bout of sickness (complete with conspiratorial visions of the CIA chasing me, the belief that my friends and family were government plants, the complete package).
I tried many times to sit upright, to prop myself up and rearrange myself, but every time I tried, it was like someone would click their fingers and I would be right back where I started. At some point I felt like I was falling forward, plummeting down through space in slow motion, then I was back in the same position, lying on the bed, looking to my left, gripping the bin. It was impossible to escape.
There were phrases that I’d use to try and ground myself: “I am in the bedroom. Emily is in New York. Foley is downstairs.” Now, all of these things were true; I was indeed in my bedroom, Emily, my girlfriend, was away in New York, and Foley, our dog, was sleeping downstairs in the living room. The only problem was that none of these things meant anything to me.
I had a vague idea as to what or who Emily was, but the words “New York” meant nothing to me at all, just that she was someone important, that they were far away, and while I knew that Foley was downstairs, I couldn’t for the life of me fathom what indeed “a Foley” was. I had a strong sense that she, or it, loved me, and that she was waiting for me, but couldn’t bring to mind that she was a dog, what she looked like, or even what “downstairs” really meant, for that matter.
I kept thinking about how Julian Vayne had recommended in one of his books that if part of a trip felt uncomfortable, sometimes just changing the lighting or moving to a different location could help. I’d tried many times to move, but doubled down on removing my eye mask (which seemed to take hours and many, many attempts), and once I could see again, the trip definitely entered another phase.
I had a very faint view of a repeating pattern, like everything in my field of vision was covered with colourful, identical shapes, but I must stress that this was very faint and almost immediately faded away as my eyes adjusted to the darkened room.
Removing my ear plugs also took me some time, not so much because they were difficult to take out, but their texture kept distracting me and I’d find myself just sitting with them in my lap, absent-mindedly pinching them lightly between my fingertips for some time, before I eventually was able to discard them on the nightside table.
I tried to reach for my water bottle on the floor, only to find that the cap was unusually large, and that trying to walk my fingers from the top to the base seemed to take an incredible length of time, like the bottle had become awkwardly stretched out away from me. When I eventually located where it met the floor with my fingers, I found that it had also become alarmingly heavy, perhaps two hundred kilograms.
I quickly abandoned trying to pick it up.
At that moment, my next challenge manifested itself. It dawned on me, quite suddenly, that I needed to empty my bladder. I tried to get up but my legs wouldn’t cooperate with me. I lay back on the bed and wondered what to do. Please don’t wet the bed… I can’t wet the bed.
I tried several times to get up, realised that it was a lost cause, and tried to maneuver the small bin to a position where I could urinate into it. This was also a bewildering task.
Even when I more or less had the bin in place, my member refused to let loose. I desperately needed to go, but my genitals felt like they were made of playdough and my urethra may as well have been sealed up with superglue.
I searched around and managed to turn on the bedside lamp, and with this light source I found that I regained more control of my body. Still the waves of needing to relieve myself kept hitting me; it was painful, even, like I’d been holding it in for a long time without realising.
I practised standing up and sitting back down again. I did this several times, consciously, this time, not stuck in a loop again. I rehearsed walking the two or three steps to the bedroom door, touched the frame and went back, sitting down on the bed again. I had to be sure that I could make it without stumbling, as once the door was open, the stairs would be to my left and I didn’t want to fall down (they’re slippery devils at the best of times).
Eventually I was convinced that if I managed to get through the door, I could make it to the toilet. It was only a metre or so from the bedroom doorway, but I was incredibly relieved when I managed to push open the door and collapse onto the toilet itself, my bladder finally emptying as I sat there, hunched over, head resting against the edge of the open door.
I pulled the cord to turn the light on and realised: Oh my God… Things really do look weird. Of course this is normal for those well versed in these mind-bending states, but I found it really fascinating. Every line in my hand looked magnified, every little detail of the door, the doorknob, everything.
This was really surprising, not only because it’s strange in and of itself, but because typically my vision is incredibly poor (I had left my glasses in the bedroom). I marvelled at this for some, some time before deciding that I could return to bed.
My coordination was still very poor, every movement took a great deal of intention to carry out. I spent some time examining the hoover on the landing, which had taken on a very queer appearance, and decided to quickly look into the mirror in the bathroom and see if I looked distorted in any way.
Other than noting how dilated my pupils were, and again how “zoomed in” everything looked, otherwise things were normal enough, so I ventured back to the bedroom.
I finally decided to check the phone, and again burst into laughter when I saw that the time was 4:20 in the morning. I took a screenshot to be sure, and indeed, when I checked later, I hadn’t imagined it.
I made some notes on my phone; my hands were all distorted and the phone seemed more like an iPad, swollen and bulky, the letters still glowing as they appeared on the screen in that magical way I’d noticed earlier, though I no longer questioned it. I kept thinking that I was back to reality, then realising, no, no, you’re still utterly loaded.
I was still having a hard time telling how much time had passed. It seemed like I’d been waiting there an awfully long time, then checked my phone again to see but ten minutes had gone by.
It was clear by now that Foley was my dog, and it seemed so strange to think that I’d been having so much trouble figuring it out before. I resolved to go and see her, and very carefully made my way downstairs, clinging to the bannister in case my feet should betray me.
From this point on, the trip was very much winding down. I was very happy to see Foley, like I hadn’t seen her in some years. She looked incredibly beautiful in an almost cartoonish sort of way, her eyes practically sparkling, but her excited, quick movements were far too much for me to handle in that tired, somewhat dazed state. I managed to settle down on the sofa with her and pass out for a while.
When I woke I felt incredibly hungry, which makes sense as I hadn’t eaten the previous day, and the acid from the lemon had given me some mild discomfort in my chest. I remembered being in the midst of the experience and thinking: All this for some heartburn.
Around eight in the morning, I ate a packet of crisps, chewed down a couple of Rennies and made a huge pan full of pasta, but barely ate any of it before I fell asleep again. I did, however, manage to write down a lot of notes. Even by 9:30 my sense of time was still pretty all over the place.
I slept on and off through the morning and early afternoon; it took pretty much all of the day to really recover. I didn’t feel depressed or anything especially bad, just the kind of exhaustion that I guess comes from being up half the night in a state of confusion.
While I didn’t see any colourful geometric shapes or get to meet Jesus or anything, I really did value what happened. No, it definitely wasn’t the kind of mystical trip that I had been looking for, and I wouldn’t call the experience spiritual in any usual sense of the word, but I had very obviously been in an altered state of consciousness, and it was the most “out of my own head” that I had managed to get in years.
No waking meditation, no breathwork, no intentional technique of any kind had ever put me in a state remotely like this, so I see this as a major breakthrough. I’ve had very strange experiences in dreams, including lucid dreams, but while truly awake I’ve never managed to really switch off; this has been something liberating for me. Sometimes my mind feels like a prison.
What happens next? Well, as I type this up, it’s nearing two weeks since that first dive into the world of psilocybin, and I’m thinking well, difficult as it was, I definitely need to return sometime, to explore the mind further and maybe even beyond.
As far as dosage, well, I really don’t know. Part of me wants to try a lower dose, four or five grams, maybe, and another part of me thinks well, you were out there, but the experience was still very cerebral, introspective, so perhaps pushing it to nine or ten grams would really ensure a breakthrough into other realms. I’m plainly no Kilindi Iyi, but it was his vivid descriptions of spending hours in fantastical, DMTesque realms that really inspired me to experiment with psilocybin.
I haven’t made a decision yet, but whatever I decide, you can rest assured there will be another winding, verbose trip report once it’s done and I have again returned to my body. Thank you for bearing with me.
Choyofaque.
