First dive: Psilocybin

After a period of roughly six months spent doing research and preparing myself psychologically I felt I was ready for a first dive. It will be with 3 grams of dry Psilocybe azurescens [I later discovered it was actually Penis envy].

At the moment I feel emotionally stuck, and as a consequence also cognitively stuck. I wake up every day with a looming negative feeling in my stomach and a negative coating to all thoughts in my head. Every social interaction leaves me guessing that perhaps people don’t really like me, and leaves me feeling bad or ashamed. In work I feel I am not good enough, I have lost interest in dating because I don’t feel good or attractive enough to present myself to others.

I find my thinking pattern a bit obsessive, and negative thoughts arise during and after interactions that I know can be very positive, such as with my mother.

Something I am not able to do since I stopped SSRI is to be proactive, to decide to engage in activities that bring me moments of joy or at least serenity.

My expectation for the days after the trip is to feel a wider range of emotions, to feel perhaps less stable but also more unstuck.

My intentions for this experience are to reflect on my attachment to others, which is something very present in my life at this moment, and on my depression, which is an obstacle to living a life that I know is possible.

The session

The day was set for December 25th, 2022. I woke up at 8am, drank water, and had a light breakfast consisting of a small cup of greek yoghurt, 5 pecan nuts broken into pieces, some keto maple syrup, and an espresso. I made sure to avoid drinking more than one glass of wine the night before, and had a good 8 hours of sleep. I prepared the items for the day.

Food: For the beginning of the session I brought 95% dark chocolate (to be consumed with the mushrooms), ginger tea, and fresh ginger (to help with nausea). For snacking at the peak and during the come down I packed almonds, pecans, pistachios, smoked cheese, yoghurt, jam, mango, pineapple, and apples. Finally for the end of the trip I brought ginger carrot soup.

Clothing: I packed a wool sweater with hood, pajama pants, sweatpants, a long sleeve wool base layer shirt, and an extra t-shirt.

Items: Eye-mask and earbuds.

I met my friends at a cabin in the woods. One friend was journeying with me and one was sitting for us. We weighted the mushrooms, which were probably around 6 months old. With a good scale (0.01 gram precision) I weighted 2g and chopped them into 1cm pieces, and I put on the side a whole mushrooms weighting 1g to work as a booster in case of need.

We put the mushrooms in a small bowl together with dark chocolate and fresh ginger. My friend and I picked different vessels: I went for a wooden bowl, they went for a copper one. We wrote on a paper some intentions and notes useful for the session. Here’s what I wrote:

Intentions:
- How to get unstuck
- Relations

Notes to self:
- You are tripping
- Don’t resist, go with it
- You are NOT going to die
- It will pass in a short time

We sat on opposite couches with a coffee table between us on which we kept the vessels, intention sheets, water cups, snack bowls, eye-mask, earbuds, and throw up bags. I put my phone on airplane mode to avoid seeing notifications and getting distracted, and opened a clock app to keep track of time, especially in the come-up phase.

We said our intensions aloud and at 11am sharp we started ingesting the mushrooms. They tasted earthy and woody, they were dry but soft and brittle, overall not unpleasant. I took small bits of dark chocolate together with each bite, which helped make the taste more palatable. I made sure to chew slowly to start the break down in the mouth and hopefully make it easier for my stomach. I was also sipping on ginger tea to help with the small dry pieces of shrooms in my mouth. Then we waited. A vague feeling of mild nausea was arising every now and then, but it might as well have been psychological and anticipatory.

For the first 45 minutes or so nothing happened. I spent my time lying down on the couch, looking at the trees covered in snow outside the window. I was waiting for a much awaited moment, arguably one of the most unique moment in my life. I reasoned that experiencing the first visual hallucination is a little like seeing fireflies for the first time, hearing music for the first time, or having the first lucid dream. I was waiting for the first sign of something beyond the normal, unaltered, wakeful consciousness, the one dominated by veridical experience of external stimuli, where objects persist, colors stay the same, and surprise is minimal. I humored myself and decided to poetically see myself as Neo the first time he prepares to exit the Matrix: when he is still inside and sees the first warping of reality, the first corner of Universe that doesn’t quite fit with the rest, that tear in the fabric of the world that reveals for the first time the true nature of reality. In this case however, contrary to the Matrix, it doesn’t reveal that there is a truer reality outside our minds, but that it is our mind that contains reality itself: the subject and the object are one and the same, nothing but a world created within consciousness and a consciousness of that world, consciousness facing itself.

The first tear appeared at 12 pm. The first glimpse behind the veil of Maya, behind the curtain at the end of the world in the flammarion engraving came in the form of a vague purplish-reddish tint on the branches of some trees outside the window. Still unsure whether in the presence of the breach, I looked around and it seemed like some colors were a little more vivid, but I was still uncertain. So I decided to put my eye mask on and see if the absence of stimuli would bring more solid proof. In the complete darkness caused by the eye mask I noticed that the vaguely colored haze I always see with eyes closed was now starkly divided in two: the top left being a brighter red and the rest a darker blue.

At this time I decided to take the booster, sat up and consumed another mushroom that was exactly 1g. I lay down again, and at this time the mind started manifesting itself in full.

Visual/somesthetic experience

At this point what I before interpreted as slight nausea became a deeply pleasant sensation of warmth radiating from my belly to the rest of my body. I could feel waves of warmth, I felt relaxed and the position of my body felt comfortable as I have rarely experienced before. The radiating waves of warmth also accompanied the appearance of psychedelic imagery. The most striking and powerful visuals emerged from the branches of the trees, from the color patterns of the wood planks above the window, and from the paint strokes of the ceiling.

The tree branches looked normal, but as soon as I fixated a subset for a couple of seconds the subset organized itself revealing a geometric arrangement and separating itself from the background. In turn, the rest of the branches to the left and right of my fovea progressively transformed into the same pattern I saw in the fovea, so that from side to side my visual field was filled with the same subset of branches repeated as in mirror shards or in a house of mirrors, assuming an overall very pleasant art nouveau aesthetic. I later discovered this phenomenon is called Symmetrical texture repetition.

Another clear sign of full blown psychedelia were the patterns in the wood. The wood planks above the window were a dark brown, with lines and knots of different shades. Faces appeared almost immediately when I looked at the wood. Again, after fixating for a couple of seconds, more complex patterns started to emerge, this time looking more like native American art figures of animal heads, monkey faces, bird feathers, and Mayan statues, which were slowly moving and morphing into each other.

The most astonishing and entertaining visuals were however on the ceiling. Wood beams separated the ceiling in various portions, and two of them contained very clear and different patterns. The ceiling was painted white with visible semicircular strokes. One portion of the ceiling consistently showed white and blue patterns resembling African decors on a woman’s dress, they were moving in a constant flow and they were wonderful to observe. The shapes and parts of the figure reminded me of Picasso paintings. The other portion of the ceiling instead inevitably showed simple animal forms, especially stylized bovines, again with a clear African aesthetic which also reminded me of the Lascaux cave paintings and Picasso’s Guernica.

Low level features such as colors and edges were the ones of the external objects in the room, except for the colors that were definitely a much more saturated version and slightly different palette from the one of the external objects.

Another notable thing was the way in which every surface moved with it’s texture showing little ripples or waves.

Throughout the whole time spent enjoying the visuals, music was playing from the stereo, which felt amazing and definitely directed part of the hallucinations, since we played a playlist with world music (Tibetan bells and flutes, African drums, and Indian ragas).

In terms of bodily sensations, my neck felt stiff, and it felt difficult to make small movements with my limbs. My balance was uncertain and I felt a little dizzy at times, with mild vertigo, but after getting used to it I was able to walk to the bathroom without any troubles.

Internal / conceptual experience

It is at this time that I decided turn my focus inside. First I covered my head with my hood and the blanket. I could still see under the blanket and I spent some time feeling like I was inside a cocoon. It was really warm and incredibly cozy, I felt like I was inside a mushroom and I felt waves of warmth still radiating from within, and it felt like being hugged from inside.

Then I got my air-pods on and covered my eyes with the eye mask. As soon as I closed my eyes I started enjoying colorful visuals. They weren’t incredibly vivid but I could recognize colored geometrical patterns. The experience of these visuals was similar to seeing colors in a dream or in the most vivid closed eye exercise of imagination. Colors were present but in darker tones, almost as if hue and saturation were there but brightness was turned down to a minimum.

I was listening to more rhythmic music. This time I felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into the cocoon, and I started thinking about my mother. Images appeared of her in her room, then of her face up close. I felt affection and love, and I started feeling tears running down my cheeks and soaking the eye mask. I started sobbing and got worries I was being too loud since my friends were outside the cocoon and I had noise canceling headphones. I spent some more time under the blanket and eventually felt I had to pee. I emerged from under the blanket and lifted up my eye mask, my friend and sitter saw me and asked if I was ok, visibly in tears I replied “This is awesome, absolutely fantastic” and off I went to the bathroom.

I believe that was the peak of my experience. I remember telling my friends I was sad this was going to end, that it felt like home, that it felt familiar, peaceful, pleasant, reassuring, and not at all scary or worrisome.

Last plunge

Then I had a little to eat, a couple of nuts and a piece of dark chocolate, and I started feeling sad that the experience was going to end and anxious I wasn't making the most out of it. I started focusing on the open eyes visuals again, the branches, the wood, and the ceiling, but also wanted to dive deeper inside. I came up with the plan to set alarms at 10 minute intervals so that I could fully focus on one thing at a time without the risk of wasting the whole experience on it. But I didn’t follow the plan and after spending some time on the visuals I decided to go in another room and fully isolate myself.

I started listening to much more upbeat music, I felt like a spaceship was going to lift off and I had to get ready. I got in bed and buried myself under the blankets to make it as dark as possible. This time I started remembering my childhood, scenes from the house I grew up in came to mind, I saw my younger mom and felt I was a child, I was little and I was held by her in a warm hug. I pushed myself to cry more, every tear felt so cathartic and liberating, but I wasn’t able to go much deeper and to follow my emotions to feel them more strongly.

I felt the darker it was the more I was able to see, keeping my eyes wide open in complete darkness felt amazing and I felt I was able to experience the closed eyes visuals more vividly that way. The upbeat electronic music produced impressions of a dark forest with bioluminescent plants, dark starry sky, and green fluorescent grass. I loved the moments in which I was totally unable to tell whether my eyes were open or closed, I wasn’t feeling my eyelids until I actually blinked and realized there was no difference, and I thought it was amazing because I didn’t need eyes to see, I was seeing with my brain, I had a direct experience of my visual cortex which was now driven by the music and by the top down activations I was able to direct by focusing my attention and deploying my imagination.

It is at this point that I got frustrated when the eye mask moved and light hit my eyes, so I decided to go in the darkest room of the house, which happened to be a windowless bathroom. I brought all my blankets and pillows to the bathtub. I decided to bring a candle to enjoy the dim candlelight and asked my sitter for help to light it up and to make sure it was safe. By now I was listening to fast electronic music, probably Everything Connected by Jon Hopkins, and I started feeling agitated, a sense of urgency, that time was going fast. I spent quite some time trying to arrange the blankets in the bathtub and was finally able to lie down and enjoy the music.

I felt the effects were slowly vanishing but I wanted to focus one more time, and this time someone I met recently came to mind, the person who introduced me to the songs I have been listening to. I cannot recollect if there were specific visuals that accompanied this last plunge, but I felt the presence of this person with unspeakable intensity. I had glimpses of us together in their room filled with the dim and warm light of a sunset. I kept going back and forth between visuals and the darkness of the room I was in. At times I looked at my phone to change song and I felt as if I was in a spaceship suspended in outer space, or in a submarine capsule floating deep in the ocean. I felt the desire to send a text to them just to say “Hello from the other side”, I felt like the kid from Stranger Things sending messages to his friends from the upside-down, but I set the rule to not interact with anyone through my phone, so I desisted.

The comedown

The closed eye imagery slowly subsided and I felt I was coming back. I clearly remember the exact moment in which, still in the dark, I suddenly noticed that the inner monologue was back, and I realized that the voice that always fills my head was gone for the entire time of the trip.

I got out from my alcove and returned to the couch in the living room where I found my friends. The room was filled with light, I tried focusing on the patterns in the trees, wood, and ceiling again. The sky behind the trees looked incredibly bright and I could still see faint patterns appear if I tried hard.

By 3pm I turned to my friends and said “I’m back”. After that moment I kept listening to music and looking at the trees. Various people came to mind, and I felt connection and affection for them. The breach was now closed, the mind covered itself in plain sight again, and everything went back to normal.

Integration

I spent the evening talking to my friends, sharing memories and thoughts. I felt more emotional and prone to tears, tired and hungry but also relaxed and peaceful. The ginger carrot soup hit the spot.

Today, the day after the experience, I felt like the knot in the stomach was almost gone. Something is still there, anxiety is still coming in waves, but the waves are smaller. Both the dull continuous pain and the sudden stabbing pain in the guts are less noticeable. Obsessive thoughts are mostly whispers and the mind seems calmer.

Overall the experience was positive through and through. I feel more confident in repeating the experiment and possibly in diving deeper.

My plan for future trips is to take the time to focus on one aspect only. Perhaps I will devote a full session to the exploration of open eye visuals, bringing textures and pictures to look at, and of other sensory modalities such as taste, smell, and touch.

I surely want to devote an entire session to focusing inwards. I plan to purchase a total blackout eye mask and to make sure I have access to a fully dark room where I can be in complete darkness, move around, maybe dance, or just lie down. A sensory deprivation vat would be ideal, but that’s harder to come by.

As I wrote these words I listened again to the songs I was listening to during the dive. I feel now how Immunity and Arriving by Jon Hopkins so deeply touched me back then and still move me now. I have never felt such a deep sense of familiarity and yet longing, of deep love and serenity, but also deep melancholy and sadness. These songs for me are changed forever. And I cannot but cherish these feelings and the person who introduced me to these songs.

Till the next dive.

Sciency thoughts

Open eye visuals appeared more vividly after I fixated for a couple of seconds. I wondered whether that is because saccadic movements cause a full refresh of the retina and of early visual cortex, and the top down activations that locks in and causes the visuals now has to happen again to become congruent with a new state of the lowest layers.

Answers to self

Are visual hallucinations more like seeing, dreaming, or imagining? Are psychedelic visuals really ineffable? Is it like explaining dreaming to someone who never had a dream? Or describing the experience of imagining a visual scene to someone who has aphantasia?
Open eye visuals were composed of almost entirely normal perceived low level qualities such as colors and edges but configurations got subsumed under concepts much more easily: some colors were drifting (but never fully incongruent with the perceived ones) and edges became more salient as to form configurations (such as patterns, faces, animals, feathers, and abstract forms). The experience was like “seeing shapes in a cloud”, but more vivid and effortless. Parts of the visual experience interacted more strongly as exemplified in the case of the art nouveau / house of mirrors effect. Finally, there was movement, especially in surfaces with uniform or simples textures: movement was much less evident on trees, and much more on the blanket and ceiling.
Closed eye visuals were more vivid than imagination, maybe similar to dreams, colorful but perhaps even less bright and with darker tones than dream visuals. Contrary to imagination they felt in front of my eyes rather than in another space (such as outside of my visual field or behind my head).

Will the experience be familiar or alien?
Eating the mushrooms per se felt a little odd, as it is odd to eat dry mushrooms. But everything that came next felt familiar. The radiating waves of warmth, the glowing brightness that pervaded my visual field, and especially the emotions that arose while listening to music felt like something I experienced in the past. The mental and emotional state felt like home, like going back to a familiar place or back to a state I haven’t experienced since childhood.

What is the experience of the body? Under moderate doses of psilocybin people are able to use their body (even if stiff and slow), and yet when blindfolded people report experiencing floating in space, flying etc. How can one have an experience of floating in space and yet feel their own body still present to the point one can control it? If one is lying down, does the proprioceptive experience of ones body appear and disappear depending on whether one pays attention to it?
Somatosensory experience was unaltered, I always felt in my body and I was always aware of my body’s position. I did not have the experience of moving when my body was still. Motor perception needs to be investigated further.

What about smells, taste, and other sensory modalities?
I did not investigate these aspects in much detail. Moving my arm, or eating a small almond felt like a huge endeavor and seemed to last forever. Food and drinks tasted somehow better and more intensely.

Questions to self

• How colorful can the closed eye visuals get if you dive deeper?
• If you focus on memories at the peak of the trip, can you retrieve arbitrary ones? Can you retrieve memories you had forgotten about?
• You said it felt really good, it felt familiar and like going back home, you were sad it was going to end so soon. Will it leave you with more joy than the one you experienced while tripping? Will it make you enjoy life more, or make you wish to escape from intersubjective reality immersing yourself deeper in the mycelial cocoon?
• Can you describe in more details the phenomenology of a content of experience that the you before diving would have had a hard time understanding, for whom the words you now use could feel confusing and be misleading?