I am a river

An experience with dried mushrooms
****Quanto ao Amanita Muscaria eu ja o vi a algum tempo atras aqui noRio
 Grande do Sul, na subida da serra em Morro Reutter. ****

I AM A RIVER

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10g of dried Amanita muscaria

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I got a plastic bag with 15g of this dried mushroom from a friend.

Although it is common in Finland, Norway, Siberia, forests in the north of the
USA, and places with the proper climate, here in Brazil it doesn't grow
anywhere, and it is therefore, very rare.

Amanita muscaria is that big fat classic mushroom, red with white warts. It is
present in cartoons, children stories, video-games, etc.

In the places where it grows, people are taught since early childhood to not
touch it or consume it, because it is "deadly poisonous", in the same way we in
Brazil learn not to eat a small red berry that grows everywhere in bushes.
Well, our berries are poisonous indeed, but in the case of those mushrooms, the
information is nothing more than a rumour spread with the intention of keeping
people - and mostly children - away from it.

But there are other species of Amanita, other than muscaria, which are
extremely poisonous, dangerous and even lethal, like the one that has the
popular name of "Death's Angel".

I was aprehensive about the effects. I had a lot of experience with
psychedelics (entheogens, halucinogens), but had never tried a deleriant.
Deleriants cause real hallucinations, so real as our regular reality, and
sometimes the subject doesn't even know he is having an hallucination, and
doesn't know that he is tripping, which is very different from hallucinogens
such as LSD and Psilocibin, on which you know perfectly well that you're under
influence of a substance and knows the difference between visual distortions
and reality.

So, the right moment finally came. My parents were traveling and I was home
alone with my brother. We set that he would "babysit" me, because I prefer to
have someone responsable around when I try something new and supposedly so
different from everything I had ever tried. He read some texts that I selected
so he could know what to expect from me, what could happen in the best and
worst hipotesis, how to act, etc.

It was aproximately 23:00 when i put the whole 15g material inside a blender.
This mushrooms have a brownish coloration when dried, but I could still
distinguish the white warts in it. I got a piece of it in my hands and put it
in my mouth to feel the taste. It tasted like it smelled. Weird, hard to
describe, but not terribly horrid as some described. I turned the blender on
for some time until all became a mix of dust and fragments, then I put the
whole mass in a plate and modeled it as a square. I used a knife to separate
2/3 of all, 10 g in other words, and put the rest back on the plastic bag. 10g
was a big amount of mass. I fasted for 6 hours prior to this to prevent
possible nausea. I didn't know how I would put all of that inside of me. The
first time I used a mushroom, the psilocibe cubensis, there was only 3g of it,
which i mixed with 1 glass of grape juice in the blender and drank. But now
there was too much of it to use in the same manner and I didn't want to drink
too many glasses and fill my stomach unnescessarily to avoid nausea and vomit.
So I got one can of something we have in Brazil, that I never seen in the U.S.
that's called "leite condensado" (condensed milk). It is a thick white thing,
extremely sweet, that is used to make candies, drinks and other recipes when
mixed with many other things such chocolate. Some people eat it pure too, but
is VERY sweet. I opened this can and poured it in a bowl, where i gradually
mixed amounts of the mushroom with amounts of leite condensado as I ate it. It
tasted good at first. Leite condensado is good. I almost didn't feel any taste
of the mushrooms, and the little I tasted wasn't bad nor it bothered me. After
eating half of my 10g, it was the leite condensado that became annoying because
it is so extremely sweet. But with a little power of will I finished eating it
all. Now all I had to do was wait.

I expected the effects to start manifesting within 1 hour, and that I reached
the peak after 3 hours of ingestion aproximately. I had rolled two joints, one
for my brother that was babysitting (is this word right? it sound so stupid) me
and one for me in case i got nausea, because marijuana is an excellent
anti-nausea, and in fact, many experient people with Amanita muscaria told me
that a single hit of MJ is enough to vanish any trace of nausea or stomach
discomfort.

I rented the movie "Baraka" for this occasion, so we both went to watch it on
my brother's room. I told him to light his joint when the movie started, and
smoke it. I didn't smoke. I just waited for the effects. The movie is
fantastic, all I can do is recommend it for you readers. Rent it, but please
smoke a BOMB of MJ before. I'm not making publicity for marijuana here, but
this movie will definitelly raise the hair on the back of your neck if you
watch it in the appropriate state of mind. My brother was entranced with the
movie. It had been 50 minutes since I ingested and wasn't noticing any
difference yet.

10 minutes later I noticed that I was getting relaxed, feeling pacific. I read
somewhere that this trip has usually 3 phases. The first being the nausea
phase, the second being the relaxation, when the person might even sleep, and
the third phase being when the person awakes of finds herself extremely
tonificated and stimulated, feeling strong, capable, invincible, etc.

Aparently I had skip the first phase, because I was already relaxing and didn't
feel anything in my stomach bothering me. The relaxation was subtle, but I felt
that if I leaned my head and closed my eyes, I'd sleep easily. But I kept
myself awake and continued to watch the movie.

Now 1:40 had passed from the start. I felt a subtle "weirdness of movements",
like if my head was lighter, but it was a very undefined feeling. I perceived
my mouth salivating more than usual, which didn't surprise me for this is one
of the "features" of Amanita intoxication. I looked at my pupils in the mirror,
but they were normal.

Two hours and something from the start had passed. My salivation was getting
more and more intense. When I talked to my brother, frequently I had to stop
talking to swallow, otherwise I'd end up drooling by the corners of my mouth.
There wasn't absolutely no alteration in the visual field. When I close my
eyes, I had this subtle "spatial" feeling, but nothing overwhelming. If I paid
attention I could notice a little stomach discomfort. 2:40 hs had passed from
the beginning, and since I wasn't feeling anything much different, wasn't
having any delirium or hallucination and everything was still pratically the
same in despite of my continuous salivation and a slightly increased ability to
get in trance with the movie I was watching, I decided to smoke a few hits of
the joint with the pretext of ending the subtle stomachal discomfort and
prevent nausea, even though I didn't really believe I was gonna experience any
nausea. The truth is that since the trip (if it can be called that) wasn't
going nowhere, I wanted to give it a boost using weed for that.

My brother smoked with me. I ended up smoking not only a few hits but the whole
joint. As I smoked, the movie got more and more incredible. I'm not attributing
this to Amanita, because this movie really gets amazing when one smokes MJ. My
brother that had already smoked a joint by himself, had his mouth completely
dry and could barely stand smoking more. But for me the act of smoking weed was
incredible and much more pleasurable than normal, for the simple fact that my
continuated salivation resolved the biggest discomfort of smoking weed, in my
oppinion, that is the dry mouth. It doesn't matter how much I smoked because
the glands under my tongue kept flowing and expelling salive. This was kinda
bizarre. As I smoked, I had to be careful not to wet the whole joint with my
constant drooling.

After smoking that joint, the sound of the movie was extremelly spatial. I sat
on the bed with crossed legs and got in a profound trance looking to the TV
screen. I closed my eyes and stayed still. The trance I was experimentating
would not be achieved smoking only weed, that's for sure. There was a
substantial difference, a spatial one. At this point 3 hours had passed.

I checked the skin of my forehead with my hands, to see if I was sweating,
because this is another common characteristic of Amanita intoxication. There
was a bit of sweat, but not much.

When the movie ended I got up and standed parallel to a wall without touching
it. With closed eyes I moved my arms around, and felt something different and
hard to explain, a feeling of amplitude and spatiality, or whatever it was. My
mouth salivated like nuts. I laughed out loud. I told my brother: "I am a
river". In fact i felt like a river. I could feel all the water in my body
going up to my salivating glands, spilling and being swallowed, making the
whole circuit again. My brother would sometimes get worried with that and would
offer me water, afraid that I would become dehydrated. I tried to drink water
in a couple of occasions, but I wasn't thirsty, because I was constantly
drinking the water from my own body. I explained that to him. It wasn't hard to
communicate with him, and the only difficulties I had were very characteristic
to the weed, like forgetting something that was being discussed one minute ago,
etc.

I was cheer, excited and happy. I spoke louder than usual and with logic (at
leasted seemed to have logic). I checked my pupils again, but they were the
same. For one moment, looking to the room, things that were far away like a
desk-lamp, seemed to be closer than normal, and things that were close, like my
brother, seemed to be further than usual, but that was a subtle and weak
perception, not totally concrete.

3:40 hs had passed. I was laying down and the lights were turned off, under
protests of my brother that finds situations like this a bit sinister. When I
layed down in the bed he turned on the stereo. I don't quite remember all that
was played, except for Stone Temple Pilots' Core and Porno For Pyros' Good
God's Urge. I can remember Porno For Pyros well, because one of the songs from
that CD starts with "Ate a mushroom, turned into Bali..." called Bali's Eyes.
With closed eyes, in the dark, I had some mental visions. They had the
consistence and characteritics of dreams, of mental images. There wasn't a lot
of them, but I can only remember one that were very clear: a very tall tree,
seem from the bottom looking up as if I was laying in a forest lookin to a tree
above me, with my head close to it. The tree didn't have any leaves, in the top
there were only branches.

After that, still laying in the dark, music start to take me over. I don't sing
well, nor I like to sing, but in a certain point I was singing all the songs
with such interest and engagement that for an observer that knew me I should
look as a mixture of ridiculous and supernatural. I felt the veins in my neck
jumping as I tried so hard to sing the closest as I could to the songs that
followed. Soon I started to improvise voice "solos". My brother were amazed and
laughed of my "engagement" to the music. After the solo session and probably
for getting my vocal chords too tired, I got in a mantra session, ou whatever
that were. I found the tone of the music, filled my lungs with air until the
last cubic centimeter, and started to let the air go slowly with an "Ommmmmmm"
in the tone of the music, until there was absolutely nothing left in my lungs.
Until I felt them glued in vacuum. I would then breed heavily, feeling the air
doubling the volume of my body, until my lungs were filled with its maximum
capacity again. Then I'd start it all again. The "mantras" were long, and while
I was "pronunciating" them, obviously I wasn't breathing. This lack of oxigen,
followed by a sudden oxigenation, followed by another lack even bigger and so
on, started to modificate my consciousness in a considerable manner. Even
withouth the aid of any psychotropic substance, through breathing exercises, a
person can feel changes in perception, them being small flashing lights,
dizziness, a spatial feeling, etc. But in that moment, after each succeding
mantra, i was becoming more and more immerse in the "trip", whichever was it.
When I did my last one, I limited myself to breath normally laying in bed. I
put some effort in staying still, and felt that sensation of lack of blood
circulation, like a thousand ants walking on the member of your body without
circulation, but on my whole body. For a brief moment I stop feeling my body
and thought that I would be able to leave it with some effort. I couldn't do
it, but the spatiallity of my perception in a mental level seemed to tell me
that it was possible.

After that I got up. I was already coming down. I was extremelly silly and my
ideas were kinda disconexed and senseless. Maybe that's the delerium. The dose
wasn't enough for visual deleriums, that's for sure. I heard and read from many
places that dosages among 20 and 30 g can get quite wild. My brother went to
sleep, once he was sure that I was ok. I played a bit of Playstation, watched
some TV and went sleep a few hours later.

If I could come back in time, I would not hesitate to use the whole 15g of
material I had. Although the trip was happy and good, I mean, there were no
traces of a bad experience, it was very unsatisfactory(sp?) and now I'm left
with 5g which will probably do nothing.

Written by Neuroglider

Created 8/14/2000 15:16:39
Modified 8/14/2000 15:16:39 Leda version 1.4.3