This was my first trip and the only psychedelic I have ever done. I took 30g of dried peruvian torch cactus pulp. This was a few months ago: the time gap between then and now has given me some really good time to reflect on what happened.
I first ate the pulp at about 11am, allowing myself to ride out the full 10-12 hours. My sitter prepared a bucket for me in which to be sick, and stuck on Brian Cox's 'Wonders Of The Universe' in the background to get my brain whirring. The first hour or so was very unpleasant; it was mostly taken up by me feeling really nauseous and wondering whether I felt weird due to the drug or just for some other reason. I could notice little things moving in my field of vision, but couldn't tell if it was due to early onset tripping or just a placebo. Bear in mind, I had tried truffles in the past and they didn't work, so I was a little bit skeptical.
Then I threw up this really horrible green sick, which came as a surprise. It seemed to happen suddenly, unlike usual vomiting when you can feel it coming. That's when everything changed. Immediately my skepticism about the trip was replaced with a sense of certainty; I was definitely tripping. Weird how it took the vomiting to bring out that certainty.
At first the room began to warp and distort and go all wavy. Kind of like I was looking at it submerged in water. The walls turned a light red colour. The special effects of the TV show, depicting colossal celestial events like stars exploding, the big bang, etc., also seemed to have this 3D effect to them, like you could reach out and touch it as opposed to it being just on a screen. I could take in Brian's descriptions quite clearly and understand the things he was saying well. In fact, the trip was entirely visual, feeling and thought/emotion-based, I didn't get any auditory hallucinations.
I had prepared a rather long, 2-hour mix of psychedelic electronic music to listen to. So I stuck that on, and was pretty instantly struck by a sense of great bliss. The music really helped form closed-eye hallucinations, though they were not how I'd imagined them. Rather than being random shapes superimposed on my field of vision, they were kinda like really fast-moving geometrical constructs that appeared to me in the intermediate space between vision and thought. That sounds weird, so let me explain. You know how when you imagine something, you can kind of see it in your mind? Well in this case, the music was making me think of all these weird fast moving shapes, and if I thought about them long enough, I would not only begin to 'see' them with my mind, but actually just about see them in my field of vision. It was kind of like imagining going down a really long and complex waterslide, and then having the waterslide come to life because you thought about it so much and so clearly. To me it was presented like perception was a spectrum or plane, and that thought and vision are interconnected on that spectrum and overlap in some way.
I distinctly remember there being one section in the music where the sounds abruptly moved from a very serene and formless ambient soundscape, to a very rigid and technical beat drop. I was looking up at the ceiling at the time. When the music was ambient, I could see a rather amorphous pattern of yellow circles on the ceiling. However, when the music changed and the beat dropped, the pattern suddenly became very orderly, and the circles immediately turned into to hexagons. This was the most memorable part because it proved to me the power of music. The rigidity of the pattern very clearly matched the 'technical' feel of the music, and it demonstrated to me visually how we tend to organise concepts like that in the brain. Is this how synaesthesia works? I'm not sure, but it felt pretty close to how people describe it.
More complex thought-vision waterslides. Past a certain point the music began to change to a darker section of the mix, and this is where things got a little bad-trippy. I had to turn off the more percussive, harsh section of the mix because it was affecting my emotions too negatively. Brian Cox kept giving me thought loops about universal concepts like quantum theory and the beginning of the universe that I just couldn't hack, so I had to turn the TV off as well. This was when the waterslides started to affect my emotions. These closed-eye visualisations really reminded me of seeing videos of fractals when I was younger, and they themselves began to just turn into these rather amorphous, scary-looking fractals. I could still feel and see the room, but it felt that if I didn't keep moving from time to time, I would disappear down one of these thought-vision fractals, and lose contact with the world I knew forever. At points, it did physically feel like I was slipping down some kind of hole, one that would be a tradeoff between developing some kind of higher consciousness, but at the cost of having to leave and forget my loved ones. I had to hold hands with my sitter to stop this feeling. But it really scared me, and it felt entirely possible. It's what made me feel far more appreciative of the things I have and love in life, because it seemed to show to me how easily I could lose them. It made me, as a conscious being, feel like I am simply observing the world from a particular point on a fractal. The closest metaphor for this feeling that I can come up with is this: everyday perception of the world is like looking at a paused fractal zoom video, while the 'higher' unmediated perception caused by tripping is like unpausing the video and zooming or 'falling' into this fractal / hole. Maybe I didn't take enough mescaline. Maybe I should have gone into the hole.
I recall getting up and going to the toilet 2 or 3 times, and this honestly made the bad elements of the trip worse. Mescaline made me feel really dizzy and unbalanced, and my bathroom is pretty small and I think the trip made that room feel claustrophobic.
More weird visualisations. My cat's head elongated, widthways then lengthways, widthways then lengthways, again and again. The pattern of the blinds covering the window flowed downwards like a waterfall. My sitter fell asleep at one point on the sofa with me, and when I looked at him - while I could see his normal face - I could also see his face on his chin, and also on his ear. Basically every head-shaped surface on his head also seemed to have a smaller version of his face on it.
The bad feelings continued so I told my sitter about it. He suggested we go outside, and I agreed that this might be a solution, thinking I did need some fresh air. At first I wasn't able to speak that coherently about what I was thinking, but eventually I was able to articulate myself and, as we moved into the garden, I started a big diatribe about fractals and cognitive reducing valves. In spite of my rambling, my sitter was receptive and attentive, and he even told me that he started to feel slightly otherworldly and strange in spite of not having taken anything. The garden made me feel much better, though. Everything in it, especially the plants, seemed to take on a more ordered form: the weeds and vines covering the garden fence, which in my everyday perception always seemed unordered and with their stalks shooting off in random directions, now spiralled around each other in a perfect shapely formation. The moss on the garden flagstones also seemed to move and form orderly formations. The sky turned pink at one point and the clouds seemed to roll outwards from the sky enormously, forming perfect hexagonal and pentagonal cloud shapes. For some reason, one particular distant spot of clouds appeared 'indented' or 'imprinted' on the sky, unlike being in front of the sky like how we usually see clouds. We talked for a while and then went inside.
After coming back inside, I felt OK but exhausted. I sort of wanted the trip to end, but knew that if I fought the remainder of it, that it would make me feel bad again. I sat in silence for a while, until my sitter told me that he was tired and asked if I would be OK if he left me alone. I was still thinking / seeing the waterslide shape things, so he said I could come in with him if need be. I lay down on my own for a while, alone, but then began to feel strange again. I went in and joined him and tried to get to sleep. This was at around 10pm, so it actually took me a full 2 hours or so actually get to sleep due to my heart and brain racing from the remainder of the drug in my system. As I fell asleep, I could still see the waterslides, but this time the complete darkness of the room helped the vividity of the visualisation's colouration along a bit, and so to round the trip off I saw brief flashes of some kind of pink-coloured, flourescent, pulsating jellyfish waterslide.
If I did dream that night, I don't remember it. My sitter and I woke up and went to get breakfast. I still felt strange in the morning and it took a few days or so to get back to normal. In fact, I admittedly feel strange occasionally now, like I'm going to fall back into the hole again. But I'm convinced that it was largely a positive experience. A few long lasting effects of the trip:
- I feel much more appreciative of the loved ones in my life; that friendships do not have to be so passing as I thought they were before, and that it is worth it to give as much love as you receive
- I feel far more able to appreciate beauty. What I find beautiful hits me 10 times as hard as it did before. In fact, I feel a lot more sensitive and responsive to emotional stimuli in general
- For some reason, ever since the trip I seem to have gotten a better idea of when exactly I will fall asleep every night. In other words, I'm a lot closer to being able to consciously pinpoint the exact moment at which I fall asleep and at which I wake up, as well as feeling slightly more understanding of the nature of the relationship between sleep, including the reality of dreams, and waking life. Weirdly enough I don't know how this relates to the trip, but I'm certain that I wouldn't have felt able to do this in recent months had I not taken the drug
- I learned that psychedelics are not to be toyed with and that I am satisfied with not doing them for a long time now, or perhaps ever again. For some reason I feel like it'll hit me a lot harder if I do mescaline a second time. If I do try psychedelics again, it'll probably be shrooms.
Thanks for reading, hope you gained something positive from this.