It was already very late when I took an eighth ounce of psilocybin mushrooms from my friend D. D was just coming down from his dose, but I had been drinking instead for the last few hours. I felt restless, expectant, a bit tipsy. What followed may have been one of the more defining moments in my life. It came on slowly, and I decided to my room set up just right. I put on some cheap Walmart brand strobe lights, threw on some solid bangers, and sat back with my friends who had elected to take the drug with me to enjoy the experience.

At first we started giggling a bit, talking about “how high up” we were. It was fun, but disingenuous, honestly I was starting to have my doubts about whether these things were working properly. After about half an hour of these meek come up games I started to kind of feel a bit strange, and had a sudden compulsion to go see D in the next room over. I opened the door of my ‘chilling chamber’ and WHOOSH!! Stepping in the hall the wall between the two rooms looked vaguely hostile, too white, piercing my senses. The carpeting looked shriveled, empty personality like in a hotel, and the staircase spiraled down into oblivion. I spied D in the next room, talking normally now, in a markedly less catatonic state than he had been a few hours ago. I weakly made the universal notion for smoking a cigarette, two fingers together, appearing to be bringing an invisible object up to my lips then away. He nodded seeming to understand, and grabbed his crutches in order to support his shattered leg. Laboriously, he stood up and walked over. Cigarettes in mouth we hobbled down the stairs, and outside.

“You feeling it yet buddy,” D asked. I paused before answering, slowly watching the flames devour the cigarette from the front, in their wake leaving an ashen corpse of what remained drooping towards the ground. “I think so,” I said distractedly. “Oh don’t worry too much about it man,” D said, only slightly concerned. “Just relax and you’ll have a great time”. We lapsed into silence and I gazed up at the brilliantly bright white moon overhead. Eventually D spoke up, “You know man, I’m really excited to see what you turn out to be.” The words hit me as very well meant and snapped me to my senses. A whoosh of compassion came over me, creating a warmth that spread through my whole body. I said nothing, but I hoped I was communicating with my body language just how pleased I was by this vote of confidence. Basking in this happy feeling I started to sink into another sort of feeling. A striking, unshakeable, overwhelming sense that I had been here before. I had somehow in my life’s journey wandered into something else, a new way of being, but instead of feeling alien it felt warm, familiar, like returning to your parent’s house after a long time except all of a sudden you can’t remember what any of the rooms look like and how to get around. I looked at D and realized that he was a guide for this new realm, he would show me the path, whether consciously or not. He was special, he was the shaman at the top of the mountaintop. With his sage advice he would guide me on the long trip up to his monastery of knowledge. He was not my only guide, there were many others, they would all show me the path through this reality.

I attempted to communicate to D his newfound shaman-ly status, but he just stared straight ahead confusedly. Embarrassed I looked down at my feet, my cigarette was practically extinguished. It was time to explore. I tried to go to the bathroom, but the green mold that was permanently on our walls began to to drip and ooze, or maybe just embodied the qualities of dripping and oozing? I wasn’t sure. Either way I was confident this bathroom was no longer my friend. For most of the rest of the trip afterwards, I elected to pee outside. For a while I wandered aimlessly from room to room; my bedroom proved to fail to have the same appeal it had had earlier in the night. The light show I still had running now appeared tacky and inauthentic, and of my previous trip mates one was no longer talking, and the other was hysterically crying. Eventually my salvation came in the form of two of my roommates asking if I wanted to go for pizza with them. I eagerly accepted and left the house with them as my new guides, contented.

I had an odd experience with people and social life on this trip. Even though I had essentially no desire to communicate my experiences or ideas to others, I still had an intense desire to be near people. Perhaps it was a security thing for me, but I felt kinships with my roommates and friends very intensely during this time. The voices of my two roommates talking in their normal matter drifted melodiously through the beautiful trees in the alive awakened spring night. They talked rather negatively of normal life issues, and were very apologetic for potentially ‘harshing my trip’, but I could care less what they were talking about as I was more concerned with the tone of their voices than the words themselves. The comforting hum of human vocal chords was simply enough for me.

I was starting to enjoy myself immensely. What a cool new place I had come to! I noticed the cracks in the pavement under my feet as we meandered along, I noticed the moon still milky white and bright, but smiling on us this time. I noticed the trees, and the faint birds, and the wind passing through grass. And the houses, marching on regimentally in time to our footsteps as we passed them. Every street was the same, it looked the same, it kept repeating. I worried that we must be stuck in some sort of loop. If this is a loop how do we escape! I dismissed this as the drugs acting on my system. In fact I realized that even if this was a loop I would not care at all! This moment was so pleasant, so magical, if this was eternity I would be pleased.
Finally, we arrived at our destination and encountered D, the pizza man. Excitedly I asked my roommates, “is D going to be my guide to!”, they laughed warmly and told me no but he might join later. Again slightly embarrassed I looked down at my feet. But embarrassment was not easy on that night, it got subsumed, practically crushed under the weight of all the other feeling and sensations that happened in and around me. We had reached our objective and we began to walk back; I don’t remember this part quite as well because of a fatal error I made. My roommates were chowing down on the pizza as we walked, and in an act of comradery instead of hunger I asked if I could have a piece. I took my pizza and had a single bite before realizing that this was entirely not a good idea and immediately handed it back. The walk was a blur as I started feeling sick, “you’re not supposed to eat on mushrooms dude,” said my wise, sober guide.

We reached the house again, and for a reason I did not find out till later we ended up in the basement, in J’s suite. J was a very nice girl; a potter and a painter, so her apartment was very bright, colourful and cheerful. Generally, I loved being in Jill’s place, but this time it was not sitting so well with me. I had been so happy just being in the brightness and cheerfulness of the outdoors, and all of these artificial colours were becoming far too much for me. The decor was too brilliant, the pottery too cheerful, the paintings too rich, the pillows too soft. I went from object to object very quickly trying to digest it all. Nausea soon overcame me and I had to rush to J’s bathroom to throw up. My head span, the puke swam in the toilet. It was colourful, phosphorescent, vaguely beautiful, but I knew ultimately evil. I got up and I noticed I was sweating profusely; I was still nauseous. I gazed out the bathroom door and my friends were all looking at me with worry. J came in first, and I attempted to apologize profusely as I normally would, but I’m not even sure if proper words came out. They asked if I needed anything, and I attempted to communicate water. My sage sober roommate from my walk took me up to my room and sat with me. He kept asking if I was okay, and if I wanted someone in the room. I was able by an ingrained response to answer that I was in fact okay, but I was very confused by the second question. After giving several false answers I eventually sat up to try to figure this out. Do I want people in the room? I looked at M seriously and contemplated this question. Eventually I found the right answer, I did want people around, but that was not what I needed. I was tripping hard and I needed to ride out this shit out myself. I sent him away and immediately felt afraid, where is my support, where are my friends and family? Am I okay? I couldn’t answer these, I knew all I could do was lie and wait.

I felt like I was on an airplane with a severed jet engine, plunging towards the ground extremely fast, but also slow enough to seem like an eternity. My body rocked back and forth with nausea, my mind exploded with fireworks of pictures and words and feeling all mixing around and bumping into each other in a beautiful display. The bouncing words eventually coalesced into sentences, and these sentence contain questions: “Am I okay right now”, “What’s the point of existence”. “Is sleep the same as death”, “Am I okay”, “What’s the point”. I seriously started questioning what the point of my actual existence was. Not in a cartoony, faux-existential kind of way, in a profound, drug fueled rumeration on the pointlessness of impermanence. Why did I do the things I did in life? Why did I worry? Why did I make music? Because it was fun, useful, important? Trying to solve these questions felt absolutely essential to my trip and I knew I had to find answers. I seriously considered going downstairs, or even phoning my mother, to try to ask others what the answers were. Eventually I decided against this course of action because I didn’t want to seem like a complete fucking raving drug addled lunatic. So I waited. Trying to solve these questions was all that occupied my mind, but it felt like hitting my head against a brick wall. My thoughts went in loops and roundabouts and never came to any logical conclusions. I was furious.

I kept this up for quite some time, checking the clock to try to say sane, but every single minute lasted hours, and none of the individual minutes came to reveal the solutions I desired. Eventually parts of my psyche started falling away. I stopped thinking about my friends down in J’s place, I eventually stopped worrying. I stopped thinking about my family, the desire to call my mother faded. Eventually I even stopped thinking about “I” or “me”, stopped being so concerned with “myself” with my “needs” and “wants”; ego death. As soon as that started happening only one question of my many remained and in a different light. “Is sleep the same as death?” I had felt like I was drowning under the weight of this drug for several hours, and by now I was so exhausted all I wanted to do was give in and fall into a deep deep sleep. But according to the logic my mind was now presenting me, this path must inevitably lead to death, as sleep and death were married cousins. Would I be okay with it if I died? In the course of this trip I had essentially stripped away my entire being, so would dying be much of a stretch? I had never been a very depressed person, I was always generally what I would consider a very happy person. But no, that’s not what this was about. It wasn’t about depression, or even happiness. It was about acceptance. Acceptance of one’s fate. In that moment I realized that my whole life I had been very scared of death. This fear had been inhibiting me from the being the person I was destined to become. It was then I knew what I must do. Instead of “solving” the questions that were so impressed upon my consciousness I must simply accept them and all their potential consequences. Maybe sleep is the same as death, but I might as well try it out and if that means I shall die, then so be it. And then I woke up, my trip was complete.