It’s been a few years since my first psychedelic experience. During that first trip, I recovered from a lifetime of psychological pain. I also discovered something fundamental about how my mind works … I’m a synesthete. I experience deep correlations between colors, emotions, people, and days of the week. Colors aren’t just visual experiences for me; they’re intertwined with feelings and time itself. This realization helped me understand so much about how I process the world around me. Since then, my life has improved to a level I never thought was possible.
But I also learned from that first experience that there will always be a constant increase in stress in my life, some self-imposed, some external. This results in a situation where I feel the need to quench that stress every once in a while. A week spent meditating and thinking through my life’s trials and tribulations would probably do it, but just as effective and much faster is a short psilocybin trip. These trips are healing experiences. I come out of them with long-term improvements and immediate stress relief that stays with me for months afterward. I’ve typically aimed to do these every three months, but although I know the process will go well, it always has an element of fear associated with it. Every psilocybin trip has been a combination of terrifying fear mixed with incredible relaxation and appreciation for the world around me.
Unfortunately, psilocybin mushrooms had been proving difficult to obtain. After six months of searching, a good friend gave me some very old mushrooms which had lost some of their potency. I consumed 3 g and had an extremely mild trip while my girlfriend kept Luna, our cat, entertained in our small apartment. I lay there meditating with a blindfold on, processing memories and emotions. This wasn’t a huge letdown, but it certainly wasn’t anything major. I did have some reservations about being blindfolded with a cat around me. Luna has a habit of jumping on us when we’re lying down; she likes to sit on our chest and purr while we pet her. This would be amazing on the right amount of psychedelics, but having it happen blindfolded in the middle of a major trip could be quite confusing and maybe a little frightening, so I made sure my girlfriend was making sure Luna didn’t come too close to me.
That small trip was enough to keep me going for the next three months, but I could feel more stress growing. After another seven months of searching, I tracked down someone selling microdosing capsules and immediately bought a bunch of them. They were made from Psilocybe cubensis B+, which was ground into a powder and added into separate 267 mg capsules. I think that’s too large for microdosing, but it actually made them perfect for weighing out a macro-dose.
On the evening before my next day off work, I cleaned the apartment, prepared some food and drink for the next day, charged my computer and headphones, and sat down to enjoy the rest of the evening, trying to remain calm and stress-free, ready for my big trip day ahead.
In the morning, I cut some fresh ginger into an insulated coffee mug. Ginger is known to have a calming effect on the stomach, and since psilocybin can cause nausea, combining the two made sense to me. I then weighed out 3.2 g of psilocybin from the microdosing capsules I had bought. I poured some filtered boiling water, honey, and the powdered psilocybin into the mug and left it to steep for 20 minutes. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with this trip, as I had no experience with this particular psilocybin supplier. Some sources of psilocybin can be very strong, whereas some can be very weak.
I laid out a very large bean bag on the floor, plugged my mobile phone into a charger, connected my headphones, and set down a bottle of water. I closed some of the curtains, turned down the lights, lay back in my beanbag, placed my headphones on my head, turned on some spacey calming music, and placed my eye mask on my face.
The trip started reasonably mild. I was seeing dark green colors, which I knew from earlier trips were representative of my internal anger, but them being so far in the background and dark signified that my anger was mild and actually quite refreshing. I lay there in a calm sea of my own mild anger. Things were coming to me, memories and emotions relating to things which had been making me angry over the past year. These were experiences I needed to expunge from my being. I could feel these emotions echoing through my body. Clenching my fists and stretching my muscles helped to squeeze them out and process them. Each muscle contraction and stretch was helping to ease the anger from my body.
Suddenly, I saw a lavender symbol which grew into a caricature of a beautiful kitty cat. It was my own cat, Luna. I could feel her presence through my right foot, and then my left foot. This felt very strange, as I had never experienced the presence of any beings through my feet like this on psilocybin before.
Then suddenly the universe burst open with bright light. A bird appeared before me, beating its wings back and forth in violent, frantic rage. Each feather of its wings represented a different day of the week, and each day blazed with its corresponding color .The synesthetic associations that normally exist quietly in my mind, were now screaming at me in visual form. The bird was chaos incarnate, time itself flapping wildly out of control. I felt terrible. I could feel an incredible emotional pain in my right testicle. The universe was pulsating with light. My head hurt. Something had gone terribly wrong. I was in extreme danger. I knew I had to escape this universe I was in, or I was at risk of destruction. I pulled up my eye mask, and I was back in my apartment. There was the same incredibly rainbow-colored moving haze over everything that I had seen on other strong mushroom trips. I looked down, and there was my beautiful-looking kitty cat Luna with a shocked look on her face. She was so adorable, but what was going on? The pain in my right testicle was immense. What had happened? My girlfriend appeared out of nowhere. She looked terrified but said, “I’m sorry.” I was too scared of this situation, so I put my eye mask back on and descended into chaos.
I had been violated. I started to understand what had happened. My girlfriend, who I loved dearly, had failed to protect me. So I had to protect myself. I curled into a ball and protected my body as best I could in case either of them decided to attack me again. My life was being destroyed. How could we ever recover from this incredible failure to protect me? I was in a panic. My girlfriend and our amazing kitty cat are the most important things in my life. Without them, what am I? Just a soul cruising through a void. The emotions were too much, and I cried out in terror. I’m not sure if I cried out in real life, but I remember it happening within the alternate universe I had fallen to in my own mind. I didn’t know what to do. I understood that I was under the effects of a drug, but would things improve by stopping the drug? I pondered this for a long time, then decided it was worth giving it a try, so I took my eye mask off to end the trip. But it was then that I realized that just opening my eyes and viewing the real world through my eyes did not get the drug out of my system. I was on this trip whether I liked it or not. I also noticed my girlfriend was actively playing with our cat up in the loft, clearly trying to occupy her so that she would not come to destroy my testicle once more.
I dropped back into the universe under my eye mask. I was still traumatized, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I lay there thinking of what lay ahead for me. Will we break up over this? Will the cat attack me in my regular sleep now too? Was this premeditated? If I’m not protected by them now, will they ever protect me? Or is my role as the man meant to be the protector while they leave me unguarded even at my most vulnerable moments? I don’t like typical gender stereotypes at the best of times, but perhaps this is how we are all connected? These thoughts circled through my mind until I began to see something else. Each being in the universe has its own role, and each is communicating with one another and providing support to each other in their own way. I could see my role in the universe was like that of a ligament attached to a backbone. Without my support, the backbone would fail, but without other ligaments supporting the backbone, I would fail. I could see ligaments surrounding me, all working in unison with me. We all support each other in different ways. I lay there contemplating this and realizing that my girlfriend and my kitty cat were simply ligaments which are right beside me supporting the backbone of the universe. Close by were my friends, and past them were my family, work colleagues, and other people in my life. But the most important ones were the ones closest to me, my girlfriend and our beautiful kitty cat. I began to see that each ligament in the backbone was doing its job, but sometimes they would fail. Sometimes a ligament would do a movement which was meant to be smooth, but it would suddenly jolt. The ligament felt at fault and tried to improve for next time, but these ligament glitches were a regular occurrence. I am one of those ligaments, and I also make regular mistakes and don’t do my tasks in life smoothly or to the level that is expected of me. I lay there amongst the ligaments, admiring how we are all imperfect at our jobs, but that as a whole we are able to keep the universe’s backbone operational.
I lay there in this ligament universe for what felt like a very long time. I wanted to wake up and go see my girlfriend for a hug, but I knew that staying there was good for me. I could feel myself healing. I felt the beauty of the universe right there with me, and I knew that the purpose of this process I was going through was to improve myself as a person and to move past my own failures.
As the effects of the drug began to subside, the abstract vision of ligaments and backbones slowly gave way to clearer thinking. The metaphor had been beautiful and meaningful, but now I could start to piece together what had actually happened in the physical world. I started to realize what these thoughts I had been having really meant. I wasn’t angry at being let down. My girlfriend simply didn’t see our kitty cat run over to me, and I had been lying on my back with my legs splayed apart. My crotch seemed like a nice jumping spot, and so Luna hopped directly onto it and, in doing so, crushed my right testicle in a very painful way. The bird I had seen, that frantic creature with wings made of weekdays, was simply my synesthetic mind’s way of processing the sudden shock and pain, translating the violation into the visual language of time and color that my brain understands. I had reacted in terror and with fear, but I had nothing to hold against my girlfriend. I love her. She is the most important person in my life, and I should never let something simple like an incredibly minor mistake like not stopping the cat from jumping on me keep us apart. Perhaps I should have taken more steps to avoid this happening, and perhaps I should have been more ready for if something like this happened. No one was to blame, and in reality, I was totally fine. I had reacted in a fit of rage, but there was nothing to rage at. Perhaps in future, I should stop and think before laying blame. I like to think I’m more in control of my emotions than other people, but under the effects of a large dose of psilocybin, any of that self-control went straight out the window. All attempts at logic in the moment had failed.
After the trip had mostly ended, I went to tell the love of my life how I felt about her and petted our adorable little kitty cat Luna, who started purring away.
One takeaway from this trip is that I should not trip blindfolded with my legs splayed open whilst there is a cat in the room. But the more important lesson is that the most important things in my life are the beings around me; the ones who care about me, the ones who give my life meaning. Everything else is just material shit that will someday be gone. There is nothing I legally own which is of any real value. The only thing of real value in my life are the beings around me.
