[Psychedelics] My First Mushroom Trip: Pranked by the Dryad

I got 10g for $25 (introductory offer, it's not usually so cheap) and took half of it as soon as a warm, sunny day came up.

As usual, I brought my 'trip pack' which is loaded with everything I'd need to eat, drink, and sleep comfortably if I am so high out of my mind that I cannot find my car before the sun goes down. I also brought snacks and a glossy photobook about the ocean. I didn't wind up using any of it. I really did not anticipate how incapacitating this much shrooms would be as prior to this point I had only taken doses of around 2g and that was on top of an NBOME trip.

The visuals shared most elements with what I have seen on LSD and NBOMES but the come up and trip in general felt gentler, more organic, weirder and more neutral. I don't mean neutral like I wasn't in awe but that it was not happy or sad or scary, it just happened and was bizarre.

I did not sense the "Mushroom presence" I have read about. Rather, I made contact with the same feminine forest intelligence that manifests about 2 hours in whenever I trip in the woods, like a recurring dream.

This time she communicated in a musical way. This was my first significant auditory hallucination. It began with looping/repetition of birdsong and squirrel chatter that I thought was laughter, then gradually became a coherent melody/beat. She began to sing:

"Are you ready for the secrets.....the secrets of the uuuuuniverse?" (This is the closest example I can find for what her voice sounded like while singing)

Intuiting my part, I chanted back "I am ready for the secrets.....the secrets of the uuuuuniverse!"

She repeated "Are you ready for the secrets.....the secrets of the uuuuuniverse?"

I chanted back: "I am ready for the secrets.....the secrets of the uuuuuniverse!"

This back and forth continued for nearly fifteen minutes. I perceived her "avatar" (the moving shape of a woman in the overhead forest canopy) dancing about wildly, so I began to dance about too like a demented little goblin while she sang her question and I chanted my answer.

Finally, the music dies down and she replies "Well you can't have 'em."

I was severely disappointed. She's all like:

...and I'm like:

...But it was also really funny, so I collapsed laughing. For the next hour or two I just laid on my back watching her flit about through the leafy cover, as a shapely pattern made from the leaves themselves. She is very beautiful and nurturing but also unstable and demanding. So I laid there arguing with her but also myself, and laughing at both, as well as at various ideas that occurred to me.

There was this one point where I got absolutely stuck staring at the surface of a tree. The bark was undergoing the most violent, intense evolution/breathing/blooming. I felt pressure on my eardrums, everything else but the tree darkened/faded and seemed not to exist.

There was only me and whatever the fuck was happening with that bark, locked in an intense, intimate interaction. There was also this powerful low pitched hum, I just felt absolutely awestruck. Fearful kind of but also floored, exhilirated and astonished.

It was like gazing upon an incomprehensibly huge and convoluted monster that absolutely surrounds you and is simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, but you don't fear for your life because you know it doesn't mean you harm. Like it's always been there, and I only just noticed it.

When I finally broke free from it I didn't let myself look at any other object for too long to prevent the same thing from happening, which in retrospect I regret, as that's only possible for like 1-2 hours during the peak so far as I can tell and was really kinda cool.

It's like how when you're trying to get to sleep, some primal part of you fears letting unconsciousness overtake you, so you keep waking yourself up at the last moment before you go under.

Finally I got to the ideation stage and it was unusually instructive. I learned:

1. Psychs can only work with knowledge that is already in your brain. Nothing is being revealed to you from outside, it's just accelerating your pattern recognition faculties so you can see connections between bits of data that did not occur to you before. This results in a high noise to signal ratio, aka lots of false positives so the results have to be gone through with a fine toothed comb to see what checks out and what has to be tossed.

2. The best way I can describe the therapeutic properties of psychs is that under normal conditions the brain strongly resists significant restructuring after childhood, so if there are any lasting traumas or errors in the reasoning used to arrive at your worldview they get locked in and compound from there as time goes on. Psychs blast your brain apart and let it put itself back together with fewer mistakes. It's like reverting your brain to that malleable childhood state so you can more easily rearrange it before it resolidifies on the comedown.

3. One of the greatest tragedies of the illegality of most psychs is that high doses of enthenogens, possibly coupled with weekly sensory deprivation tank sessions would dramatically accelerate the rehabilitation of violent criminals. Achieving the same result with state subsidized psychotherapy and antipsychotics takes longer, is more expensive, has sometimes tragic side effects and is in all ways less efficient.