Sixth dive
Every time I have tried psychedelics so far, it came a moment when I felt the desire to share the experience with someone else. Most dives I have described happened in the company of one or two other people, but the experience was mostly private and I made a conscious effort to limit interactions with others during my trips.
Partially motivated by my desire to share and connect with others, partially inspired by the group experiments described by Alexander and Ann Shulgin in PiHKAL (a truly transformative reading), I resolved to organize a communal experience with some trusted friends.
The opportunity arose when a dear friend — which I will call G — decided to taper off SSRIs and try mushrooms, just like I did six months ago. After hearing about my experiences, my friend told me he would follow my advice on dosage, set, setting, and all details of the experience, and I was gleaming with happiness at the thought of facilitating the first psychedelic experience of a dear friend. I was committed to use all the knowledge I gained from my pervious experiences, even if little, and all the tips I have learnt by reading all I could on set and setting, preparation, integration, etc., to make sure my friend’s experience was useful (a plus if also positive and pleasant). I wanted to be particularly careful because I knew G recently had a bad experience with THC edibles, which left him with temporary psychotic symptoms (mostly affecting tactile perception and motor control). He was fully aware (and more knowledgeable than me) of the risks psilocybin, but on my side I was committed to help him deal with this worry in the back of his mind by making the rest of the set and setting as comfortable as possible.
Excited by the opportunity I started planning the event weeks in advance. I booked a cabin in the middle of the woods a couple hours away. The initial plan was to have around 8 people, but some couldn’t join in the end, so the final number was 5: G, A, T, J, and myself. Besides G, everybody else had previous experiences with mushrooms, and some also tried LSD and DMT, so the level of psychonautic expertise was more than enough.
We drove to the cabin in the morning, having only a light breakfast, and reached our destination around 1pm. Each of us picked the dose they felt comfortable with, which ranged between 1g + 1g booster, 2g all at once, and 3g + weed. Considered we are of similar build, I advised G to take 2g, the dose I took for my very first dive, and that I reckoned would be strong enough to give him a taste of visuals and non-perceptual effects while still being manageable and not overwhelming. For myself, I decided to wait until G reached the peak, so that I could be fully there for him during the come-up to observe and savor the process from the outside, and to be there for him in case of need.
The come-up
We diligently prepared each dose of mushrooms by chopping and weighing them. The cabin had a set of multi-colored plates for babies, with separate compartments and an animal figure on each of them, and they looked perfect. We filled one compartment with the mushrooms, another with nuts, dark chocolate, and candied ginger, and the remaining one with the optional booster. I also made the traditional ginger tea.
The session started at 2pm. They ate the mushrooms sitting on the couch, in front of the wood stove, listening to a playlist I put together to start the session (notable songs being The Unquestioned Answer and mostly chimes). In my past experiences I always enjoyed waiting for the effect to come up while sitting in silence or just listening to music. This time however something felt odd. I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t partaking, because of the number of people, or something else, but after roughly 10 minutes I suggested we go for a short walk outside, which I thought would defuse some tension and apprehension, could help with nausea, and perhaps make the effect appear faster by increasing heartbeat and metabolism. We started hiking up the ridge behind the cabin without following a path. It was pretty steep and we managed to get to the top in roughly 10 minutes. The trees were still naked and the ground was covered in dry leaves, but it wasn’t too cold.
The onset was surprisingly quick. Around t+0:30 J said that the leaves looked interesting, that they created a lot of patterns, and G said the colors were noticeably brighter and that he suddenly felt lighter and in a better mood. After looking at the bark of some trees we decided to walk down the ridge and back to the cabin just in case the effects got too intense to walk down the steep slippery muddy slope. When we entered the cabin we found that A and T got back earlier than us because for them, too, the effects started pretty soon. A immediately declared he was tripping balls, which was understandable since he did 3g. I was elated in seeing they were all having a good time, especially G, who looked very excited in this come-up phase. He even took a moment to tell us he loved us and he was really grateful to do this together, and that he was particularly grateful to me for planning all this and making it happen.
G felt he would rather be outdoors and so G, J, and I went back outside and walked to the little stream of water running near the cabin. G commented on how the moss and the rocks felt alive, on the occasional faces appearing here and there, and on how this all felt so familiar and just like what he expected. He beautifully voiced a thought I entertained myself. He said that rather than feeling strange and different from every other experience he had before, rather than making the world look different in an unexpected way, he was now experiencing in full what he always felt was behind his filtered perception of reality. He said that he always knew this connection with the natural world was there, that it was something deeply rooted in his view of the world, and that now he was able to experience it, that now it was manifesting in a more powerful and unfiltered way. And his words resonated so much with my growing belief that psychedelics are really mind manifesting more than mind altering, in the sense that in my experience they manifest what’s already in there, letting the content of the mind, the thoughts, the meaning break free and color the world around and the one inside, instead of being forced to manifest as a string or words or the usual monologue in the mind, or manifest something completely alien, unexpected, inconceivable, unnatural (I am of course aware that this likely valid only for this compound and this dose regime).
On our way back to the cabin we stopped to admire a series of mushrooms growing on a fallen tree, and another fallen tree trunk that even to my sober eyes looked full of faces and captivating details. G decided to pull a chair in front of the log and spend some time with it, and joyously said he would really love to do mushrooms with his mom, because his mom already sees the world this way, talks to the spirits of trees and rocks, and has overall such a similar view of the world that being in this state would either amplify it or simply confirm it.
I then went back inside and spent some time at the ground floor of the cabin sitting in front of the wood stove watching the fire, listening to music, enjoying the company of my other tripping friends, and occasionally checking in on G to see that everything kept going smoothly. I was eager to engage and be there for G, but I also realized how important it would be for me to leave him space. Every time I took mushrooms time felt different, and the long introspective moments of disconnection from the environment were among the most interesting and useful ones. Being sober and looking at the process from the outside I experienced how hard it is to judge if someone is going deep and having a pleasant experience or rather a bad one. I resolved to check on G at intervals of 30 minutes minimum unless he spontaneously interacted with others, which happened quite often. And for future sitting, I noted to myself to agree on an explicit sign the journeyer can use to show distress: something such as a word or even just a gesture (such as crossed arms in the air) that they can use to ask for help without having to articulate what is going on. I was honored to have my first trip sitting experience with G since he is such a dear friend, and I was lucky because I was sure my task would be easy given how knowledgeable and wise of a person he is.
Joining in
Around t+2:00 G seemed to have plateaued, and since he was having a great time and looked superbly comfortable, I asked him if I could join in. I started munching on my 3g, happy for the opportunity to observe someone else’s dive from the outside, and eager to see where my staggered dive would lead me.
During the time I was sitting for G I snacked on nuts and chocolate and ate some cheese, and I realized that again having eaten something made the belly and bodily sensations much weaker: there were no noticeable waves of warmth or shaky legs at the onset. After roughly 30 minutes I started noticing some stiffness in the muscles of my neck, and that’s when the visuals started. I was lying down on the couch observing the patterns on the wood planks covering the ceiling and on the central beam of the cabin. The large and round timber beam was carved all around with a huge number of faces and each flat surface started looking like it was painted in a different color. There was no movement but the palette was one of the most beautiful I have ever seen: it went from shades on blue and grey to a fantastic variety of warm colors with yellow, orange, red and purple tones. The end of the beam closer to me had a large wood knot and the more I stared at the circular shape the more it looked like the beam was on fire and the circle was the center of a majestic sunset. I could’t help but tell my friends the beam was on fucking fire and there was a sunset in it and they were all surprised and happy to hear but no one seemed to share the experience: most of them were probably past the most intense phase with visuals.
I spent a good hour on the couch listening to music, focusing on the visuals and devoting some time to introspection putting my eye-mask on.
Then we all went outside. It was around the t+3:00 mark for the others when A asked for some weed. It was a little early for me since I was more than one hour behind, but I felt the visuals were already almost gone so I decided to partake.
Second wind
It was a bad idea. I took a couple of long puffs from an indica THC vape, and one puff from a sativa one. Pretty soon I started feeling dizzy and seeing stars, likely due to a drop in blood pressure, so I went back inside and lay on the couch in the same spot as before. The visuals on the wood beam became more powerful than before, the sunset on it was astonishing and the red sky surrounding the wood knot was filled with flames, one for each carving mark in the wood, and everything was flowing and radiating from the wood-knot-sun. I then focused on the side of the beam where a series of vertical wood veins ran parallel, and symbols resembling hieroglyphs on an Egyptian obelisk started appearing.
Just like the visuals of the first peak, the visuals of the second one were intense but short lived. The dive however lasted much longer, and visuals gave way to challenging experiences focused on bodily and mental content. The first challenging aspect had to do with the breathing. I felt my heart beating in my chest and an unpleasant sensation of something stuck in my throat. In hindsight I reasoned it might have been due to eating food, which I think I should avoid in the future. At various times I scanned my body and intentionally tried to relax any muscular tension (a tip that G was very grateful for), especially my abs, where most of the tension was concentrated. I tried focusing on my breathing and thought that as long as I was breathing everything would be fine. I was lying down and couldn’t find a position where I felt I could relax my whole body and let go without gasping for air. I felt that I was holding something in, that there was a bodily tension that needed release, and that if I were to stop controlling my breathing and relax my whole body, something really strange would happen. I felt something would break, something would come out of me, or I would come out of something. The image of giving birth came to mind for a second, but also the usual feeling I have when I know I have to throw up but I hold it because throwing up is one of the things I hate the most in the world. At the same time I also felt like the I was constricted, trapped in a small place, that I couldn’t breath. The image of experiencing my own birth came to mind, but it was quickly replaced by the thought that I experienced this before and I didn’t know if it was some forgotten memory of chocking on something as a child, or an ancestral / made up memory of my own birth. I recalled that both me and my brother were born with a C-section, and I wondered if it was because of tangled umbilical cord or other problems. The thought was meaningful, but I didn’t give it much credence.
Never before while diving have I experienced such a prominence of bodily sensations. I felt self-conscious about it and I tried to bring myself to ask for help or simply voice my discomfort to my friends, but I didn’t want to ruin their experience. I managed to mention that I felt like I would stop breathing if I didn’t pay attention, at which point G, who was already in the come-down phase and mostly back, told me not to worry about it and that he would make sure I kept breathing. I wasn’t really afraid of it, but I felt I couldn’t let go as much as I would have if someone was sitting next to me inviting me to forget about everything and engage in whatever was the scariest thing to do. That was the moment when I felt the desire to be in a ceremonial context, when I felt for the first time the intense appeal of engaging in the purging typical of Ayahuasca rituals. I felt that releasing all bodily tension might result in the experiential transformation I was being pulled towards, should that be through screaming, crying, vomiting, defecating, or whatever form of physical release my body would have engaged in if only I were able to truly let go. I resolved to seek for an experience in which it wouldn’t feel embarrassing to just do it, with the right container, understanding, and expertise from a facilitator.
The second challenging aspect was still related to the bodily turmoil, and in a sense it felt like it was the mental, conceptual, existential aspect of it. The need to focus on breathing was in fact accompanied by the feeling that if I stopped paying attention to the breathing something transcendental would happen. I felt the strongest urge to let go of myself, let my mind drift completely into this place that was pulling me, it felt like falling asleep but also like gravitating towards a dark, scary place. I felt that my focus on breathing was simultaneously what I had to do to make sure everything was fine, but also what was keeping me from drifting away completely. I felt that if I stopped paying attention to it I would either fall asleep, break free from a barrier and transcend into a completely different realm, or die. I really wanted to do it, I was aware of how challenging and scary it was but also that it was the right thing to do. However, I couldn’t bring myself to. I even tried to stop breathing intentionally and went for what seemed like long periods of time holding my breath, but I felt like I was holding back rather than letting go. The breathing always came back, at first it felt like I was “breathing without breathing”, or that the breathing resumed in the background without me being the cause of it, but never was I able to make it past that wall that separated me from that terrifying and yet irresistible darkness.
Resolutions
I resolve to dive deeper, to avoid weed and go deeper with higher doses of mushrooms, to create the container where I might finally be able to let go, with or without others.
I also resolve to dive with friends more often, to trip sit and be trip sitted, to dance and explore nature, to be more honest about what is happening, and to see whether sharing more can actually bring myself and others in the same place.
