It was the neo-hippie early 90’s, the bohemian bourgeois prevailed, and I was in college. A few friends, my roommates, and I split about 1/2 oz. of mushrooms. I ate mine, and others decided to brew theirs as tea. They were very potent, colorful, (bright blue and green), and they tasted particularly bad. (they do grow on cow shit after all. yum!) We must have been smoking a lot of pot, too, as that was a daily occurrence back then. After ingesting the mushrooms, my roommate Chris threw up. So the beginning of my trip was thinking that the mushrooms were poisoned and we were all going to die. Not a good start. I didn’t say anything about it though; I just let it fester inside me. Our ‘babysitters’, two friends who were not tripping, brought some trip toys with them. They covered the TV screen with tin foil that had little holes poked through it. A nice visual effect. They also brought doodle tops, (colorful painting things for kids). At some everyone was sitting on the kitchen floor painting with the doodletops and it occurred to me that I could stop my heart just by thinking about it. I spent the rest of my trip in the bedroom freaking out while my boyfriend at the time was telling me about the real meaning of Star Wars, explaining about the dark side and the light side…This freaked me out even more. In the other room, Chris wasn’t doing so well either. He was talking to god, and Loudly. This scared the hell out of me because Chris doesn’t believe in god, and there he was screaming away, exorcist style. Everyone was in Chris’s room trying to help him, (c’mon, man, Chris needs you. Let’s all gather around Chris) and I just couldn’t go in there. I knew there was something in there with him that was going to eat me. Instead I locked myself in the bathroom. I made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror. EEK! WHO IS THAT???
Lassi is an innocuous and delicious yogurt drink found in South Asia and your local Indian restaurant. Bhang is
Mild, me arse! Indeed euphoria me arse, it was horrifying.
I am led to believe through stoner hearsay (though ever since that experience, I’ve been pretty much an ex-stoner) that the animal fats and sugar in the yogurt augment the molecular structure of the cannabis, intensifying its effect. Asking Nepalis afterwards, they estimated that there was about a quarter ounce of bhang in each drink, since a) it was Holi, b) we were paying over the odds, c) our mate said “make 'em extra strong”, and d) we were westerners.
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Acid. At night time I lay down under the washing line and looked up at the stars. They were 3D! I could see the distance between each star, how far away they were from Earth. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.
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Anti-depressants. As the drugs built up in my body I passed through a phase where I would have nightmares all night long. They were drawn out of my nonconscious so freaked me out totally. I would wake up shaking, then because I was so tired I’d fall asleep again and have another nightmare, etc. It would be a great torture device because your own mind produces whatever is scariest to you.
So many strange and interesting memories.
Only time I did acid: Went to see Lethal Weapon 2. Real bad idea. That’s where I learned that your setting is very important to the experience. All I really remember is seeing a profile of Mel Gibson, and his face melts away, leaving only his nose. Afterwards, I couldn’t speak to my friends. Just couldn’t make the words come out.
Mushrooms 1: Visiting a buddy in the mountains of Western Maryland, we ate mushrooms and went on a hike. We came home, and sat on his porch. Something someone said made me start laughing. I really lost it. I couldn’t stop laughing. And everything they did or said, made me laugh harder. They noticed and kept saying random things. It got so bad that I was in pain, and the laughter was just a physical reaction. I was no longer amused. Like dry-heaving. Afterwards, they didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t want to be laughing.
Mushrooms 2: Last Friday. Not really a freak out, but interesting. It snowed in Austin last Friday. It had a small accumulation. I was taking the cab home from a show. The cab driver didn’t know how to drive in the snow. We began to skid, first to the right and then left. He turns into the skid. This just makes us spin onto the left shoulder. At this point we are facing on coming traffic. We keep spinning, back across the highway, finally coming to a stop facing traffic on the right shoulder. 1 and a half total spins. When it started, I just started laughing. It was the strangest damn thing. I was never in fear of having an accident or getting hurt. It was like being on a ride at an amusement park. Luckily, it was 1:30 in the morning, and the oncoming cars were quite far from us. Oh, and in the middle of the skid, the drivers cell phone starts ringing, and the ring tone is Chopin’s Minute Waltz. I just kept saying “That was so cool.” The driver began to laugh with me, and made me promise I wouldn’t tell his wife. It must have made the adrenaline rush though, because I couldn’t fall asleep until 6:30.
This past Christmas break I was staying at my friend’s place and one night we were on the 3rd floor, just hanging out and… uh… having a good time. There was a small chimney fire due to creosote (sp?) buildup. Thankfully, though, the fire dpt. made it there and put it out quickly.
To make sure that no fire had started cops and firemen went through the place, though somehow they didn’t go into the room we were in ten minutes before. yay.
Roskilde music festival, can’t remember which year…
I bought a LOT of mushrooms in Christiania, and while there I ate a couple of baggies of… some mushrooms, and a couple of capsules of dried-Hawaian mushrooms. In the train back to the festival, I was hallucinating like some sort of… hallucinating… guy, so Idecided it was due time to eat about the same amount of mushrooms again.
The next thing I rememer is at the R.E.M concert. Everything is black, everyone is a paper cut-out and the ground is soft as a sponge. I’m literally hanging on to a friend of mine, trying to talk to him but eevrything is in super slo-mo: “Duuuuuude, doo yooo haaaave aaany cigareeeettes?”. I make my way to the stage only for Mr. Stipe to stare at me for minutes on end and he keeps trying to reach out for me. This freaks me out quite a bit so I go back to my tent, where my friend starts singing random songs in his (flawless) Eric Cartman and Smurfs voices. When the rest of the guys show up, I’m huddled in a corner - I had laughed and cried so much that I couldn’t even talk and I was all read and swollen from the tears. I go out for a piss, and as I’m standing there by a huge windmill…electricity… thing (we always camp there - easy to find) peeing, I look up at the clear sky, full of stars, to witness a blimp flying over. The whole experience was mind-blowing.
A couple of months later, I have some mushrooms here in Reykjavik. I started hallucinating almost at once, and left the “classsy” bar I was in after I started a conversation with a Michael Owen calendar. We go to a gay-bar, for some reason, where I meet and talk to Albert Einstein and get yelled at by a Mike Tyson poster. After some time, I really, really have to go to the bathroom - so I go to the bathroom. While I’m taking a piss, I realise that at least two guys are staring at me. No biggie - it’s a gay bar after all and I’m too interested in the dancing patterns on the wall to care. I pee for what seems to be an eternity, and as I zip up I notice that there is no toilet where I was standing. I had been peeing on the wall. In hindsight, I just hope I was in the bathroom. 
I like mushrooms - I always get a nice, albeit a very strange trip and I never really freak out because I know that I’m just hallucinating. I’m not touching acid with a stick, too powerful and you can’t control it as well as the 'shrooms.
I don’t really do acid any more, 'cause I’m old. But I used to like doing it quite a bit. At some point during each trip, I would turn into a werewolf–I would get all hairy, I could feel my teeth and claws growing, and my fact would stretch out like the guy from An American Werewolf in London. It was pretty disturbing the first couple of times it happened, but then I learned that if I just got in a room by myself while it was happening, everything would be OK. Sometimes, I even enjoyed it.
So I dose with a couple of friends, and we end up in the park near our college eating pine needles, and we decide to return to my friend’s dorm room for some music. The sun was going down, and it wasn’t a good idea to be out there after dark, what with all the space vampires roaming around. As we enter the dorm, we run into the dorm attendant, who is an acquatence of mine we will call Bill. Now Bill is kind of a putz, but he’s dating our friend Victoria, so we’ve kind of been hanging out with him. Bill says hi and makes conversation, but there’s something odd about the way he’s acting. Finally, he says “Hey man, Victoria broke up with me. Wanna drink with me?” A shape on the table resolves itself into a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels, and his odd behaviour makes sense. Of course, the answer to his question is “No, we don’t want to drink with you, because you don’t know we’re tripping, you want to talk about what a bitch Victoria was for dumping you, you’ll probably start crying, and your face is melting.” But formulating a diplomatic way to say that was beyond any of our current language skills. There was a horrible moment of awkward silence, and then I started turning into a werewolf. Bill was staring at me with an awful drunken intensity, and I was afraid I would have to tear out his jugular and eat him because he’d seen me. I started to back away slowly, and he said “What’s wrong, man?”
My trip partner Hamlet sensed disaster and interposed himself between us, talking some bullshit while I retreated up the stairs to the room, where I was unable to speak except in grunts for some time. Finally I told Hamlet what had happened, and he said “Oh, don’t worry about it. He couldn’t tell you were a werewolf.”
I had a cheesy cliched apocalyptic trip one time after doing five hits of gelatin windowpane. (This was the night that I learned that the tolerance that you develop for LSD goes away a lot faster than I had previously imagined-- I was used to during crazy doses about twice a week, but had laid off for a month or so.)
I was listening to this Negativland mix on a good ol’ fashioned cassette tape, and during a call-in “Bible Quiz” section where the question was “True or False: The Bible says ‘Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the spirit.’” Somehow this came across to me as “Do not drink alcohol, but by all means do as much LSD as you can manage,” and I was surprised to find such advice in the canonical scriptures. Just as I was digesting this, Something Bad happened. The tape player noisily ate the tape. I took this as a Bad Sign, and very quickly concluded that the End Times had arrived, which was interesting in that, had anyone asked me earlier in the day, I would have confidently told them that I was a staunch atheist. Slipped my mind, I guess.
Now everything was all-over Christian. The person who had given me the acid was named Chris, and, although he was not related, shared my last name. This obviously meant that I had received True Communion, from Chris T., my brother in Christ. As I tried to relate this to my roommates, I became further agitated by the revelation that everyone I lived with had Biblical names, which of course meant that they were the Biblical figures for whom they were named.
Then the apocalypse started. My digital clock flashed a steady 6:66. Every single-point light source was framed by a golden triangle, which meant that the trinity was making itself visible to me and communicating that now was the time when everything got properly sorted. The pores in my skin, now that I looked closely at them, were not only cruciform, but grew in size until the voids formed by the millions of crosses obliterated my physical body, leaving me conscious of only an vibrating energy that contained my consciousness. If I concentrated on my body image, it manifested itself again. I could turn it on and off at will.
Then came a moment of doubt-- I remembered that I was hallucinating and tried to do an impromptu inventory of everything that had tangible existence. Unfortunately, this involved touching things rather hard. “This poster is real!” thwap Poster is torn off the wall. “This VCR is real!” Smack Around this time, the only member of the household who was not an acidhead took it upon themselves to call 911 for an ambulance. Someone else had a better idea and simply told me that I really had to stop hitting things, because it was making people uncomfortable. Made sense to me, and I calmed down and started to talk about the end of the world in a more calm, reasoned way. Well, relatively, anyway.
While I was relaying the various signs and portents that had been revealed to me, I was struck by a horrible realization: Language drives time. “In the beginning was the word.” “To the last syllable of recorded time.” Brainstorm! I could avert the end of the world if I started talking backwards. Reverse language creates reverse time. Luckily, I had a pretty good understanding of how individual phonemes sounded in reverse, and often amused my friends by taking requests for reverse speech, which could be confirmed with the aid of a toy sampler. Why had I taught myself this trivial skill, if not to save the universe from annihilation? I soon realized that just pronouncing the words backwards wasn’t enough. I had to reverse my aspiration, too. It would be disastrous to explain this to my friends in forwards speech, of course, because I wasn’t sure how much time was left. I explained myself backwards, as best as I could.
This attracted the attention of a houseguest, who came downstairs to see the show. She was a hippy-dippy lady of about 40. I’d never noticed how radiantly beautiful she was. She was glowing, literally. This distracted me and left me dumbstruck. I opened my arms and stepped towards her to give her a hug. She reacted with alarm and back away quickly, saying, “No, no!”
Of course, then I realized that she knew exactly what was going on, which was that it wasn’t just language that drove time, but sex, as well. Well, heterosexual sex, anyway, since the book says the game started with Adam and Eve. It all came to me in a flash, because her name was Gardener.. Armed with this knowledge, and knowing that desperate times called for desperate measures, I dropped my pants and urged my best friend: “Fuck me in the ass! Err, No! One! Sah Honeypuff! Sah Honeypuff!”
That’s when the paramedics showed up at the door, although it seemed like I’d been hearing the sirens arriving for hours. They sounded like angels’ trumpets.
The paramedics looked dubiously over the shoulders of my roomates’, at the lunatic in his underwear repeating “Sah honeypuff! Sah honeypuff!” while appearing to be in some sort of respiratory distress (talking while inhaling, and all,) as a couple of people endeavoured to get his pants back on, but accepted assurances that everything was under control, really, and eventually they went away.
Then my friend Chris showed up, bless him, since he’d received an urgent call to swing by to convince me that he wasn’t Jesus after all. By that time I’d calmed down enough to realize that I was freaking out and that things would carry on just fine the next day, anyway. So Chris wanted to gently counsel me on my “coming out.” He’d just come out within the past year. He seemed disappointed when I explained that my desperate calls for anal penetration really were nothing more than a misguided attempt to reverse the flow of time.
I have no idea how I made it through the next day at work. I didn’t realize you could get an achey hangover from acid. Oh, brother, can you ever.
Anyway, of the several hundred LSD trips that I took in my salad days, that was the only one that I consider a bad experience.
Heh- vibrotronica, drunk people can be a trip. I remember one time one of my roomate’s boozy work friends showed up unannounced, with a friend in tow, one night when three of us were sitting around with Uncle Sydney. The roommate that he actually knew was down with a cold and not open to company, so instead of taking a hint and hitting the pavement, they came and sat in my already crowded room. Picture five people in a room with one chair, a stool, and a bed. Lucky for me I had an ancient stereo which doubled as furniture. Of course, we weren’t about to let on that we were tripping, because there’s nothing worse than “funny” drunk guys who know you’re on acid. Two things I remember well-- [ul][li]Dave losing a freshly-rolled spliff in my recliner, and attempting to find it by holding this huge chair upside down over his head and shaking it, inches away from three people tweaked out of their gourds. Big recliner. Small room. [*]His friend talking about the time he saw Hendrix open for the Monkees. “The Monkees rocked, man!” True quote. [/ul] Good times. [/li]
Of course, other heads can be just as perplexing. I’m thinking of the time a bunch of us went to see Earth Girls Are Easy. Exiting the theatre:
UselessGit, that is one of the funniest things I’ve read for a very long time.
Well, I used to do hallucinogens all the time - now I do mushrooms every couple of years. Age and all has caught up to me. :eek:
Well, the strangest freak out I ever experienced was the time, many years ago, that a group of my friends decided to go camping on acid. This was not as good an idea as it seemed, as we neglected to take any “babysitters” [i.e. people not on acid] with us. Even more foolishly, we took the acid before setting up camp.
Anyway, we were camped in a ravine near, but outside, the city, beside a shallow but very beautiful river. There was a bus that ran near the place, so we didn’t need to take a car.
We dropped late in the day, and after sitting around a while in that trembling moment before it hit, we all suddenly realized that we had not set up camp.
Sudden panic, everyone running around on various tasks … I was setting up the tent, which was no easy feat, as I started to peak … the lines were like spiderwebs, and I a rather unhappy spider in the middle.
My friend, a big stoic (fortunately!) fellow, was collecting firewood. Unknown to me, or any of us, he was using an axe with a loose handle, which turned in his hand … the axe went into the side of his foot.
Well, we all gathered around. He was bleeding. A lot. I felt myself start to get panicky - I was peaking on two rather potent blotters, and the blood was squirting out - I was having trouble evaluating whether it was really, really serious or not. Eventually, I decided that it was. But what to do?
He was (or seemed) quite calm. He said, “you brought a first-aid kit?” - indeed, I had. I wandered over, got lost for a bit, then found it and wandered back.
Everyone was down by the river now … there was a trail of blood leading the way; in fact, there was blood everywhere - the axe was lying in a pool of it. He was washing the wound in the river.
Since no-one was volunteering to be doctor, I did it - I wrapped the wound in a roll of gauze, and taped over it with surgical tape. Amazingly, this held, and didn’t cut off circulation to his toes - problem solved! But, it was getting dark, and there was no way at all to get home.
I remember looking down at my hands - covered with human blood - and looking up at the blood-red sunset and thinking, “the night has just begun”. It wasn’t exactly a good thought.
Problem was that we had very little firewood, and the thought of sitting in the dark was unbearable. We gathered what we could (no-one touched the axe) and sat around staring into the flames. I made a trip in the dark with another friend and a pitifully inadequate flashlight to look for wood, which ended when my friend blundered through a spiderweb and started to freak out. “I’m covered with spiders! Get them off!”. I assured him it was just the acid and calmed him down, but when I looked at his back, it was indeed covered with many ugly spiders. I brushed them off, without telling him. That ended the foray for firewood.
Well, we were all sitting around, and somehow we were all in the same wavelength - I don’t believe in telepathy, it is more like “everyone thinking the same thing at the same time”. So much so, that we were completing each other’s sentances when we talked.
And mostly we thought about the fire. The fire was live, and love, and hope. The fire COULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO GO OUT, no matter what. It just couldn’t. But neither could any of us leave the fire to get firewood … we were reduced to burning toilet paper and drink crystals (surprisingly effective!).
We listened to the voices in the brook - and then we heard voices in the woods. Coming towards us. And then lights. Moving towards us. Cops? Well, there was nothing to be done about it. We sat awating our fate.
However, who showed up was not cops, but three guys we very vaguely knew from high school - Heavy Metal types, the kind into Satanic rock. They had, it appeared, heard that there was a “ravine party” and arrived with their box of beer to party it up.
What they saw must have been more that a little disturbing. Eight guys silently sitting around a dying fire, smeared with blood - blood all over the ground - an axe lying in a pool of blood.
Nor was it obvious where the blood came from (my injured friend had pulled a pair of heavy socks over his feet, which hid the bandage).
Eight heads swivelled around to face them - from eight mouths the identical message greeted them, in tones of doom: “Get Firewood!”.
Well, get firewood they did. They ran around like beavers and soon assembled a big pile. None of us moved, or indeed was capable of moving … to me at least it seemed inevitable, right and just that they should have arrived out of the blue as our wood ran out. Then, as quickly as they had came, they left.
Well, we survived that night, and the next day were able to return. My injured friend got some stitches at the hospital, and was fine. All was over.
Exept that the next week at school, people were avoiding us and looking at us funny - turned out the Metalheads, after fleeing in panic (we had no idea of that - they were just there, and then gone), had told everyone they knew that we had “killed some guy with an axe in the ravine in a Satanic ritual - they ordered us around and threatened to kill us too - we only escaped by a miracle!”.