Credit: wifflegif.com
By Wes Annac, Culture of Awareness
Continued from Part 1
Our next story is called, “The I of the Storm”, and it comes from Erowid user “Keith Fonda”. Note that the author also used cannabis during this experience, which could have enhanced it.
“The long-anticipated day had finally arrived! Myself and my dear friend ‘R’ had been planning this experience for what seemed like forever, and seeing him turn up at the train station finally cemented it in both our minds; we were finally going to have the experience we’d wanted for so long.
“The plan was quite simple really. We intended to head from London down to Bewl Water in Kent, pitch our tent and each eat 15 grams of Atlantis Truffles, aiming to return to London the next evening. Bewl Water is a large man-made reservoir in the south-east of England, although the scenery surrounding the water gives no hint of the fact that it is artificial. When we arrived at the campsite at 7pm we knuckled right down to pitching our dull brown tent from the mid eighties.
“We were trying to take as little equipment as possible; a tent, a stove (since we were not allowed campfires), two guitars, a propane lantern and a pair of sleeping bags. This was because we both wanted the experience to be an affirmation of everything true and beautiful in nature, and did not want to clutter it with creature comforts. Since we’ve both been at university in west London for the past two years, neither of us have the opportunity to spend much ‘quality time’ with nature…”
“…Back at the tent, we split the 30 grams of truffles into two even piles and began chewing them up, washing them down with orange juice. I believe orange juice is a wonderful gift to people who like mushrooms. The flavour masks that of the fungus wonderfully (maybe even compliments the flavour of truffles?), and the niacin and vitamin C go a long way to promoting a feeling of wellbeing.
“With the contented knowledge that a good dose of psilocybin was slowly working its way towards our brains, we grabbed the propane lantern, a relatively thin poncho and we headed back to the lake.
“We noticed that for the first time that night we had become more ‘internal’. We’d stopped speaking to each other so much and we both recognised this. Not because we had become bored of talking to each other, quite the opposite. We both felt the urge to talk about something, as we always enjoy each others conversation, but our minds were thinking so fast that it almost seemed pointless talking about anything because we were so taken with the thoughts we were having.
“Walking was beginning to get harder. We used the flashlight and the propane lantern continuously and yet we still managed to get lost! We suddenly realised that we had walked further than we intended into one farmers field. We were just beginning to feel our minds slip when this happened so our feeling of ‘being completely lost’ was a gross overstatement. We only needed to walk about 600 feet back up a hill, but with the time dilation coming on strong it seemed as though we would have to walk for hours to get back on track.
“On the way back up the hill, a figure seemed to run directly towards us a great speed. Both me and R jumped out of our skins (one of the few times in my life I can literally say ‘jumped’). Oh… Turned out it was a rabbit. How embarrassing… These truffles are obviously beginning to have a real effect! I wondered how much further out of our heads we would go.
“Back on the path between the trees, we began to feel as though we were going ‘down the rabbit hole’. The trees gave us this wonderfully warped feeling of being in wonderland. It was not a scary experience by any stretch, but that edgy adrenaline-like sensation of a mushroom come-up was giving us lots to think about! When we finally arrived at the lake we decided it was time to sit down and smoke [cannabis].
“‘Jeez’ I remember thinking. ‘These truffles are seriously beginning to knock me for six!’
“‘I know what you mean’ R replied.
“Wait… I thought I thought that? I obviously didn’t… That was weird. I could have sworn I didn’t even hear my own voice! By this point we were both beginning to trance off hard. The world was beginning to burst into these tessellating hexagonal pixels that seemed to grow in size and whilst doing so removed the level of detail I could perceive in the world. The pressure behind my eyes was beginning to build. My brain felt alive with activity. The pixilation was beautiful.
“It never fails to shock me how normal this all feels when you are on mushrooms. It is so easy at times to forget that you are tripping at all. It is hard to tell how long we remained in this location, but in ‘trip-time’ it felt like an hour. This was mostly spent in silence with the occasional interjection when something particularly interesting happened.
“After a while we decided to move further along the waterfront for a change of scenery. We walked for what was in reality about 5 minutes, but it had felt like a good 20. When we stopped to look back we were surprised at how short a distance we had travelled. None the less we sat down again as the body buzz really began to take over.
“We decided to smoke another joint. At this point I pulled out R’s Peruvian flute. This is a very simple six hole flute (more like a western recorder than a flute) which gives a very soft, pure and slightly spacy sound. I had never played it before but quickly figured out a minor scale and began to let my brain play the instrument rather than my fingers. This helped us both reach a very peaceful and contemplative state. One can never underestimate the power of a simple instrument when tripping.
“I handed the flute to R, and after a bit of persuasion I taught him the minor scale and he began to play. I think the feeling of having produced a melody from this flute for the first time really elated him. After a few more minutes of silence pierced only by the sweet sinusoidal sound wave from our instrument, we lit the propane lantern up again and headed off around the lake.
“During this walk I repeatedly asked R to turn off the flashlight which he was holding. I tried to explain that we didn’t need the flashlight if he would keep it off and let our night vision adjust to the level the lantern was putting out. Whether it was that he was so outside of his own head he didn’t really take in what I was saying, or whether his nerves forced him to keep the flashlight on I don’t know but it took several sharp reminders before he kept it turned off!
“After walking for what felt like at least an hour (in reality it can only have been 10 minutes or so, time dilation was enormous) we got to the point where we did not have the drive to walk any more. It was now pitch black and beginning to get much colder. I knew that the low that night was only going to be 16°C, but it felt as though it were closer to freezing!
“We each took a seat on a rock and slowly drifted into complete silence. From here time lost all meaning. We did not move from this position for what felt like so long that any attempt to make an estimate would be futile. The peak was a series of half-remembered memories; vague ideas of what happened, but no idea of when they happened or why, although their insightfulness was not lost.
“We both remember getting a lighter out, staring at it intently whilst it was lit then letting the world plunge into darkness when it went out. We were also entertained by the floaters it burned onto our retinas. By complete fluke we both saw the floater at one point as a strand of DNA; quite unusual given the number of different forms it could have taken. The CEVs we were having by now were wild. I remember seeing cascading fractalised rainbows inside my eyes.
“When I opened my eyes these semi-annular rainbows seemed to drift through the night sky. Occasionally they would turn into tunnelling fractals which met at a point where there was this tessaract-like 4D object which looked somewhere between a sphere and a cube (almost impossible to describe in more detail). It seemed to rotate and morph between these two forms. By this point the experience felt transcendental. At the high end of a +++ experience on the Shulgin scale.”
Read the full story here: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=92318
Concluded in Part 3 tomorrow.
