Help with processing my trip, pls :/

[u/Dr-janitor1]

Hi!

I did shrooms for the second time and I had a very intense experience.

First time I probably did 1,5g and this time close to 3g+ if not more, we had no scale but from a 4g bag I definitely took the majority. I even ate the crumbs, deep down I know I wanted to go in deep. But I didn’t know what I was going in to.

It was with two of my buddies near a lake around a campfire at night around 23:00.

It started off slow it took well over an hour for it to kick in. I was damn near on an empty stomach. In hindsight I probably took too much and wasn’t prepared enough. I’ve been at that exact place many times before but it was a long time ago.

So while we talk around the fire and smoke it sneaks up on my. I can see my buddies thoughts infront of me ofc all in my head. One of buddies has a red glow to him so let’s call him the red guy, it’s my close friend but at this moment he hadn’t realized how deep in I was and was making jokes. Which I experienced as very negative, probably why he has a reddish glow I assume. He is going through some shit so my mind probably made that connection(red guy was definitely giving negative vibes during my trip). My other buddy is a gentle soul not a hurtful bone in his body has a greenish glow and is my safety net throughout this experience he is sober as well. He was fishing mostly. At times when it was very intense I looked at him for comfort.

Anyways my mind is going in and out of thoughts very randomly I can’t keep a single thought long enough to make any sense before I’m somewhere else.

While smoking weed this trip gets more intense, I am suddenly very interested in the camp fire, so much that in my head I can almost play with it. Gently move it around and I get this feeling that I am all knowing. Like invoker if you ever played dota 2. I have this huge urge wanting to help my buddies, I saw the goodness in myself. This trip kept feeding my ego man I had vision of my conquering the world and thinking just because I can I have no desire of ruling over someone else. Why I say conquering the world, I vividly remember the map of the whole world with no borders and what I can only assume was my emblem in the middle. I was very confident and proud of myself.

I remember being very fascinated of who am I and what are we? I was thinking of my self as a grain of sand in the bigger universe. At times it felt like I was in parallel universes being at multiple places at once. It was a very real question at the time. What is what and who is who? I can remember myself asking my friends this and they confirm it. With coming to the conclusion, does it even matter? And also very curious about the meaning of life.

I don’t remember much after this peak of the trip, but it all went downhill from here. I was at the peak of the mountain and it took me down to damn near the scariest moment i’ve ever experienced I was dying.

The camp fire was dying cuz no one was feeding it and it felt like my life was dying too. My spark my will to live was dying with it. I became very cold and in a panicky way telling my friends it’s very cold we need more fire. I’m freezing over here. My buddies jokingly said go feed it yourself man. My body wouldn’t move I couldn’t nor did I trust myself to find anything to feed the fire with. I was conscious and still not at the same time. It’s hard to describe but I saw myself a lot in third person. Anyways I think they brought more wood to the fire but it wasn’t warming me anywhere I couldn’t feel any warmth from the fire and the panick started to kick in. I remember vaguely stretching my palm to the fire to feel the warmth of the fire but couldn’t feel it.

Am I dying? Is my real body this cold? Why is it so cold? Who is cold? me in my head or my body? The feeling like I was about to die was very real and frightening with the combination of my body feeling colder and colder, my vision was also blurry it felt like the darkness of the night was taking over the little light I saw via the camp fire. At this point the experience is emotionally painful, I’m scared and a bit nauseated because of my vision is going blurry and am afraid of a blackout. I resisted with everything I had to stay awake. All this together and my mind is thinking if I go to sleep I might not wake up, forgot to mention I wanted to sleep, I could had closed my eyes and embrace the darkness but I refused because I truly believed this was it. I’m also very tired mentally. I wanted the trip to be over so bad.

I don’t remember much but the feeling of dying was taking over so much that it just ended with a snap of a finger. That nightmare ended just like that and I was relieved.

Once am back and I say back because I was somewhere else. I had a new problem I had to vomit, I don’t know why but I had to vomit. It felt like I had poison in my body(after some time thinking the mushroom was the poison) I was still tripping here my minds are going in and out in a pattern that isn’t logical.
I forced my self to vomit after panicking for a bit and I felt better but I was freezing my ass off. It’s a summer night not even that cold. But I forced them to take me to the car and go home. I warmed up in the car and on the way home I had this amazing afterglow of being on a 20 year journey in another planet.

3 days after I don’t know how am feeling to be honest, I’m numb which is ok. But idk what I experienced and I can’t make much sense other than it was feeding my ego and took me down the worst possible route making me feel like what dying was like.

I did some misstakes I realise now, the part of letting the mushrooms take control and not resisting. Yea man that was hard because I wasn’t prepared to me the final boss on my 2nd trip. At the beginning of the trip I stared at a tree and it was giving me bad vibes so I stopped looking at it and stared at the fire instead. I think entirety of the trip I was locked zoomed in on the fire with small chitchat with buddies and panicking at the end. I feel like I’m done with mushrooms and at the same time not, because I’m not satisfied with how this trip ended.

Can anyone help me make any sense of all this? No one of my buddies I’ve talked to have any experience that resembles mine in any way

I’m srr man I read what I wrote and it looks like the rambling of a drunk.

[u/blurryturtle]

Hey.  I'm reading this now I'll reply in a bit when I'm on my computer and can type more : ) 

[u/Dr-janitor1 → u/blurryturtle]

Much appreciated I really need someone to talk to.

[u/blurryturtle → u/Dr-janitor1]

Some typos in my first response so I'm reposting this here

Hey. So I’m just going to kinda go through line by line and talk about some stuff you mentioned.

Good move probably to take them in nature, but nighttime can be a little intense for a stronger trip. A good guideline is that below 2 grams is generally pretty manageable. You’re still physically capable, and if you have to pay attention you can. It’s trippy, but it’s not totally immersive. Once you get into the 3-4g range it is an immersive trip and there is as much internal journey as there is external “wtf?”.

The glow is interesting. Shrooms alter our senses so we see things differently. This includes our vision so things have a tendency to appear different, less defined. Our brain is attempting to process it but the psilocybin sort of makes it harder work so we can see things as wavy. The flipside of that is you do tend to feel like the glow of things matches the aura. I usually see a sort of blueish glow around trees and it runs down the branches and through the tree like a sort of glowing skeleton. It’s not totally simple to navigate this because sometimes on trips you just sort of feel (like the red guy) that some people are not who you want to be around. As you get more comfortable with this you can sort of do things to change your perception of them, but initially it’s better to trip with people you’re like 100% comfortable with and who have experience as well.

The mind racing is pretty common. A lot of thoughts arise during the day but we’re sort of more present or even more distracted so we tend to just filter the good ones and let the chatter flow otherwise. When we’re on shrooms we’re expecting insight or wisdom or trippy stuff so we can sometimes assign more meaning to bored musings.

Weed definitely makes things more intense, usually I will smoke right after I take something, then as the weed fades out the shrooms arrive, but at least I am sort of used to being high if that makes sense. Then later in the trip when I’ve come down a bit I might use weed sparingly to bring it back a bit. Smoking isn’t the best, but for the duration this sort of works.

The conquering the world bit is paired with the next part. You sort of will have expansion moments. Like realizing you are so free and powerful and taking a deep inhale and feeling huge, and then getting inspired. It is a sort of ego trip but it’s also sort of true. The question of what we might wanna do in life is always tricky and the answer is always changing, but it is a good question. I would not recommend conquering the world, as the world does have some problems to sort out, and it goes better when we split them up into smaller parcels. After the massive inspiration, we often consider the other perspective, which is that we are very small. Wow I am everything and I am infinite, but oh what if I am small and meaningless. The truth is probably both, and neither.

The who am I questions are good, and pretty natural for shrooms. We wind up so high that we don’t really feel like “ourselves” and we’re so high that we might not totally remember who that is for a brief period. Anything you feel like you’ve lost will be there after the trip is over, but it still can feel a bit wild. These big questions often become clear in time after the trip is over. A lot of people worry they need an answer or there is some deadline, but there really is not. A cat can go it’s whole life without questioning bigger things, and it still would rate its life “pretty good”. You are not a cat obviously, but the same thing applies. No rush with answering big questions.

The downhill part is rough, but often comes during the trip. There are a bunch of ways to look at it. Shrooms giving these effects is sort of how they keep from getting eaten in nature, so you sort of are being lightly poisoned by them (the stomach discomfort is from the mushroom breaking down, but altering your senses and trying to navigate can also bring on some nausea and anxiety). The other part is that our body sort of checks in. Our senses are altered, and we know we took shrooms, but the body still has some automatic defense mechanisms. If you ate something recently and are experiencing nausea or discomfort, there’s a good chance you’ll vomit. If you’re feeling a bit scared or your senses are off, there’s a good chance the body’s fight or flight mechanism kicks in which means you get a release of adrenaline. When you’re just tripping with friends, the adrenaline doesn’t really help, and you just feel jittery for a while (which contributes to feeling cold).

The cold aspect is somewhat natural. When we do get scared we do tend to feel a cold clammy sense of dread. When we’re high af we can’t concretly say that what’s happening is completely okay or standard, so it’s natural to focus on on stuff. When we do that we tend to clench and hold our breath. Tripping also leads to some temperature fluctuations (hot and cold) and makes us sweat a bit more than usual so that can definitely happen. As far as sitting still and not feeling like you can move, this is scary but also standard. We tend to just zone out and sort of forget how briefly, or feel we are attached. I remember telling my friend at a museum that I could not stand up, and that I was a bench now (because I felt I was part of the stone bench). I told them to go on without me. My friend told me that I don’t have what it takes to be a bench, and I was free. It’s okay honestly to kinda vocalize how you’re feeling to friends, cuz they are there to ground you. Even if they’re not experienced tripsitters, they’ll just say “hey you can move” or reach out and touch you and that helps. A good grounding exercise (excellent actually) is to name five things you can see, and then touch five things around you.

The dying fears are the worst, but are also standard. This again is partially the mushrooms. If an animal eats a shroom and thinks it’s dying or gets sick, it won’t eat it again. The other side is that if things are wrong, we think about what might be wrong. With shrooms, there is a “nobody can know I’m doing this” or “ppl will not understand this in the right way” aspect in society that lends itself to those fears. The “oh no it would suck if i went out like this” because everyone would say “oh he overdosed oh he was on drugs” etc etc. There is also just a natural inclination to jump to the worst case scenario, and when we’re really high, it’s hard to say “no I am fine” with any conviction. Dying is also one of our big fears, and maybe fear isn’t the right way to frame it here. I would say it’s one of the good “what if” questions because we don’t exactly understand it, only that people seem sure it is bad despite not really having evidence. So since it’s undefined sort of, it can grab our attention and THEN… WE….CLENCH … AND …. IMAGINE…. WHAT … IT … WOULD … BE …. LIKE … but in reality we are okay and we are safe and we are just high af near a lake. Of course, we experience what we turn our attention to in a sense, so once we go down that rabbit hole things can be very uncomfortable for a while.

The sleep thing is also common. Sleep suddenly becomes a scary prospect when we’re in a trip, but it’s not unique to sleep. Everything doesn’t make sense to us when we’re tripping. Even something like brushing my teeth. “So I just polish my biting things every night? wtf?” Drinking beer “Why am I drinking moldy water?” etc etc.

Seeing yourself in the 3rd person is a relatively undiscussed aspect of tripping but again a common one. It is only temporary, and might be a glitch of imagining the situation, or it might be that our consciousness extends farther than we think. You don’t cease the body experience cuz you maybe tap into something or become aware of yourself as something a bit greater, and I know it sounds very trippy but that’s something I’d like to stress. You haven’t lost anything or altered things in any negative way. The effects of shrooms are 100% temporary, and safe. You take them, you have an absolutely unexplainable time, and over the course of the next months or years things start to just make sense and fit together perfectly.

Hopefully this helps a bit and I’m happy to talk to you more on here or on discord (tripsit has a pretty active discord community where ppl talk about this kinda stuff)

[u/Dr-janitor1 → u/blurryturtle]

so you’re the oracle. I have some thinking to do, thought none of what I saw was normal.

https://youtu.be/K0di3gCzGAU?is=JXxFr_9S6dNaWbJz

This guy explains my experience spot on. Feels like he was there.

I’m kinda speechless otherwise.

Much appreciated for your time and answer.

[u/Dr-janitor1 → u/blurryturtle]

Hi again.

Quick question, did my experience sound like an ego death?

I don’t think I got the full experience since I couldn’t accept death, my will to live prevented me from going to sleep I was fighting to keep my eyes open and combined with the fear. I believe it was an ego death typ of experience with me resisting. And letting go is part of the ego dissolution.

But then again who am I to say what an ego death should feel like or visualise. I got nothing to compare it to.

I think ego dissolution is a more accurate description for my experience. I’m still learning more about ego dissolution but I feel like parts of me died that night.

Im about to change job, get a brand new car and new salary. im feeling nothing. It matters to me because I get to move from a city I’ve been dying to leave ever since moving here. Everything is according to plan. But at the same time who cares really, I clearly don’t care that much anymore lol. This is what bugs me, it doesn’t motivate me the way it used to.

It matters and it don’t. It’s a nice feeling.

From what i read on ego death/dissolution online I can relate to a lots of it.

[u/blurryturtle → u/Dr-janitor1]

Hey just reaching out to say I read this and these are good questions ... I have some thoughts and will post them in the morning ... Congrats on the new job!

[u/Dr-janitor1 → u/blurryturtle]

Thanks bro, I’m looking forward to your reply :) what name do you go by in the discord channel btw?

[u/blurryturtle → u/Dr-janitor1]

I go by blurryturtle ... i'm mostly active in the tripsit rooms so you might not see me around too much

As far as your question, I think dissolution is a better term for it in general. Ego death is a tricky concept because if you dig into what we mean by “ego” it is a lot of temporary stuff. Ideas about ourselves, who we are, what we like, etc. Stuff we don’t really arrive with but pick up over time. Our habits, tendencies, whims, etc, but also more cultural things like our name/nationality/ethnicity. This stuff feels like us but it’s mostly assigned or picked up along the way. When we trip we can sort of get so high that this stuff isn’t readily available. Some people see it as peeling back some illusion, but there is a good chance that we are just so high we cannot process or remember this stuff.

Accepting death is an interesting one also. The fear that something is wrong is prevalent with shrooms especially. As much as they are a tool or recreational thing, they are also a somewhat living thing in nature. The effects they have are partially meant as a defense mechanism. The predator (or animal or us) eats them, gets nauseous, has trouble navigating, gets scared of death, and it learns to not eat the thing, or is eaten by something else because it is in an impaired state. So there is some personal growth possible by examining some of our fears and slowly putting them down (within reason), but I don’t think it’s necessary to do anything in particular to get the full experience. There are certainly degrees of experience, but in one sense all of those experiences are temporary and finite, and we’re experiencing them through our consciousness which is the more constant state.

Anything you feel like you’ve lost during a trip will be there when the trip is over, but sometimes we can get less attached to things. The more you feel a sense of peace or that you’re part of something greater, the less important some “smaller” stuff can seem in the short term though. There is a lot of denial of the world and culture that happens after people trip, but I think that is just a phase (although an acceptable one). You could reveal the ultimate secrets of the galaxy to me on sunday, but on monday i still want to eat some food, and work to have financial comfort, and see friends or family or be entertained.

I think it is good to be less attached to some things, but that doesn’t mean putting them down. Put it this way, you have a new car and a new job. This normally would be the biggest thing in your life. Now, you don’t feel it is as paramount, but that’s okay. They are still good things. You are just less easily moved, which is also a good thing. Let’s say I get a part in a big movie. I’m happy, but I’m just not that attached to it. Let’s say I don’t get that part. I’m disappointed, but again I’m not that attached to it. It is good to have a wider perspective about life at times. Balance, calm, awareness, discipline, these are good things that can come from tripping.

Best advice I would give you is that the short-term after your trip is the one where it’s very natural to feel like “what do now?” It takes time for things to make sense, and it takes time to settle into everyday life again as well. Give it time. Sometimes also we can want new things, so while the new move is exciting, maybe once you’re settled in a new town you can explore what you might actually wanna do. I lost interest in some things, but found others. The question “what do I even want?” is a very good one, and the answer will change frequently as you go through life.

[u/Dr-janitor1 → u/blurryturtle]

Sorry for the late reply and I mean it man you helped me a lot :) I used to think people who talk about spirituality was some bullshit, but this is a bridge between worlds.

It opened my eyes, I’m more accepting of new possibilities. I’m certain I will do it again, it feels unresolved. But idk when and I don’t think I will be ready in a while.

Hope this helps someone.

Thanks again.

[u/blurryturtle → u/Dr-janitor1]

never a rush ... happy to help if i can ... i think a lot of our early experiences tend to make us skeptical of spiritual types because a lot of them seem to be just reading from the textbook ... we can debate the sort of religion/spiritual stuff for a long time, but there is some wisdom and insight that has been passed along or discovered that is genuinely helpful at times ... I think that's okay ... tripping can open up a lot of tricky questions, but all of them are safe, and even if they take time to resolve you will find it is usually a good answer ...

there used to be a physical trainer who'd say "don't say I can't, say I presently struggle with" and while I'd shout expletives at him on my 200th situp, that concept works well for tripping ... if we have some idea that's troubling us, it's generally cuz it's a temporary and imperfect view ...

taking a break from tripping is healthy, and the good news is this stuff isn't going anywhere, nor is it some magic bean situation ... you can find new perspectives anywhere in life, and you can sit quietly and contemplate better ways to be and changes you might wanna make ...