[Pulled from journal archives . Perhaps it could be useful to someone, but on rereading sounds a blt trite in certain areas.]

There’s nothing that can prepare you for the experience. No amount of reading of another person’s account—even this one—that will help you understand what you might go through.

I was a fool, thinking that I could attempt my first experience having just read about it, and without a guide who had done it before, and for thinking I could handle the larger amount. I don’t know how someone could just go to the mountains and ingest the mushroom without support. After my experience that seems somewhat suicidal.

I took too much. I experienced astoundingly beautiful images and had insights on things that were important to me. I also thought I had overdosed and could really have died—my heart stopping, really just an extension of the slight facial muscle paralysis or weakening on my left side. I rolled around on the floor with nausea and almost-shock from lack of food from probably foolishly attempting it in the morning after a long fast. Perceptions altered, short term memory somewhat unable to function as it normally does to weave moment to moment into a more coherent story. The in-between wake and dream state extended into an hour or more. I was desperate at times to want it to stop. I wanted to know if the drug had peaked so I could convince myself that my heart wasn’t going to stop, that I didn’t overdose.

Downstairs in the darkened room with the meditation music going, I had clearly started on the pleasant journey after close to two hours after the first mushroom stalk and head. Absolutely exquisitely beautiful images in my mind morphing as the music played. Millions of points of prismatic pins of light shaping the outlines of castles and plants,
iridescing into brilliantly lit other-colors. Simply no words can describe what was in my head, my mind. I didn’t know where those images came from—the music was an important part, guiding in some sense the transformation from moment to moment. When the sounds subsided between “songs” I ached for the music to come back to guide the images some more.

For most of my pleasant side of my journey I was also grounded by the physical body. I felt weak and hungry and slightly nauseous while experiencing the grand images of my mind. The awareness of the physical and the non-physical was certainly a theme in the overall experience—I was at times intensely aware of my mortality yet was off in an intensely non-physical experience.

Around three hours after first ingesting I went upstairs—I was feeling quite sick and needed something, food, water, sugar, anything to help me feel better. That was the beginning of when I started to seriously wonder if I had taken too much and was in real danger of dying. I felt stupid for having put me—no, Helen, really—in that position. I wasn’t okay with dying and wasn’t okay with having her have to be the the one to call 911 or to tell anyone what had happened.

I can’t recall the sequence of where I was when what happened—I know I was on the couch with Helen talking with me and I was feeling less scared about dying. It was clear that I still had paralysis/slowness from the mushroom, but I felt at some point that I was past the critical am-I-going-to-die point and so Helen and I went back downstairs to the music and the glorious glorious mind images.

“Break me down” is what said out loud and to myself when I first started experiencing the effects. I was doing this “trip” for a purpose, dammit. I asked that my subconscious give me insights on my (conscious) fear of death, and on relationships. I wanted to break myself down, to get rid of the “ego” that incessantly talks (and listens). Later on, toward the end after I knew the effects were fading and I’d live, I also asked to be healed. I breathed “break me down” and “heal me”, with tears slowly streaming down each cheekbone.

Somewhere in the middle of the experience my insight was “life is precious”. I don’t remember why that came up, only that it was important, very important. I now take that to mean my life and the lives of others, and that by important I, or whatever it was that was talking and listening, mean that experiencing life is important, that the physical body is important (keep it healthy). Life is a gift, although that word wasn’t used in the message at that point in the experience. There was no morality attached to things, which to me in this moment could be interpreted as “do what you want” selfishness, simply a message that life is precious.

After most effects had faded and I was trying to come to grips with my original question about fear of death, I realized that “life is precious” is the answer to my fear of death. Possibly. I’m still trying to make sense of it all.

It’s been several hours since I knew the effects were mostly gone. I couldn’t conjure up those beautiful images in my mind if I tried now. My left hand isn’t typing well—it seems like the left-side semi-paralysis dropped from my face to my hands. I trust that will pass in time. I’m trying to sort things out still. I know that it felt like both an important spiritual experience and a letdown as I didn’t have new profound insights. It’s clearly too early to know of long term effects on my outlook and behavior, but right now I’m feeling like it’s easier for me to help people in their own journeys.