January 20, 10:07pm

I thought I had mushrooms all figured out—I would eat breakfast and wait for 5 hours and make a tea from the 3.5g, thinking that a fuller digestive system and no actual mushroom tidbits would lessen the nausea. So I ate breakfast at 8am, waited until 12:30 to prepare tea by crushing it all and putting the powder in a tea bag and brewing it on a slow boil for five minutes with a little bit of lemon juice would work. I drank probably a bit over half at 1pm, thinking that I would drink the rest at 1:20 or 1:30. I was downstairs in the darkened family room, fireplace was going and meditation music was playing. By 1:30 it was clear that it would best that I not take any more. By that time my muscles were starting to tense and shake and I could feel that this wasn’t going to be like the first time with a very pleasant beginning.

I started by wanting to know more about my missing experiences in life, and wanted a non-dual experience. Instead I realized through the nausea and shaking that mind and body are not separable in any possible way, at least for me. I kept asking “why am I so different” meaning both with my reaction to mushrooms and why in general in the world—the lack of experiences, my fucking food intolerances, my body sensitivity, and all that. The music I picked this time was different—not the Native American flute as it was the first time but a more modern set that brought different images to my mind. More science fiction-y and fewer in general. I was aware of human faces or humans in my images but no interaction with any entity (again).

it was harder this time. and Helen wasn’t here. I went upstairs earlier than the first time and tried to eat a little, drink a little, anything to help relieve the nausea. I lay down by the french doors again and opened them to get the cold air on me, to make me shiver and quake, hoping that would help me. I was deep in the distortion and disassociation phase with no signs of letup on it. I alternated between going downstairs and lying down on the carpet, hands wide, thinking of the crucifixion, closing my eyes and letting images and sickness take me, and then going back upstairs to try to feel better.

The ends of the tree branches were animated and morphing; later they looked like they were enveloped in a cottony fog—my brain was pulling down the effect of the clouds to the trees. Dreamlike state as I walked through the house, going to the bathroom.

At one point the only thing I could do to keep myself going was to set a goal of going downstairs and turning off the fireplace. Then my next goal was to call Helen. She wasn’t able to talk long as she was in the car driving with Karen and their cousin Michael. Then I had a goal of telling S.—anyone, really—what the details were of the tea and the lemon juice and how much I had taken. S. offered to come up and I said yes. I was still on the floor by the back doors when he came in 15 minutes later. it was almost 5pm at that time—about 3.5 hours of mostly constant nausea and it wasn’t going away. I wanted to black out but I realized that the mushrooms just amplify whatever my mind was feeling and I knew that if I blacked out, if I let go, that i’d just experience the sick feeling even more, so I tried hard, so hard, to keep awake and to distract myself.

S. called a friend who said that alcohol stops a mushroom trip so I had some amaretto liqueur; I don’t know if it really does stop it as later searches strongly implied that people mixed them to good effect, but within 20-30 minutes I was feeling enough better to eat a bit more, which helped me feel even better.

By 6pm I was still experiencing some disassociation with space still being wrong but I was mostly over it. By 7pm I was just hungry and tired and feeling off but nothing like what I felt before.

Lessons learned: NEVER EVER do this again—my body is very sensitive to it in a negative way (2g tea not after fasting lasted 4+ hours, almost all of that time I felt quite sick), that body and mind can’t be separated, that music became reality (at the first of the trip) which made me think that generally what we focus on becomes reality for us.

January 21, 2019 7:50am

My sense of full reality hasn’t yet fully returned—dimensions are still off and I’m still a bit disassociated from things. Things are both familiar and not familiar. It could be from the ½ a pill I took last night to help me sleep.

I don’t mind this mild state too much—and I can see that feeling non-nauseous while experiencing this could be interesting but I expected it to be all over by this morning.