My Worst Mushroom Trip Ever
By: Dana Spore
Tags: Life Lessons, Empathy, Relationships, Psychedelics, Mental Health

When I was 23, I introduced my wife to magic mushrooms on a camping trip.

I had told her about my recent psychedelic adventures and she was curious to try it. I chose a campground that I thought would provide a pleasant environment for her first fungal experience.

We went on a waterfall hike and swam in a frigid creek. Back at camp, we set up 2 hammocks, and we each had music and headphones ready to go.

I soaked my 3.5g of psilocybe cubensis in lemon juice before eating them. I gave my wife a smaller dose. We ate the drugs early in the afternoon.

We got in our hammocks and stayed there three or four hours. Everything was going fine — great, actually; we were grinning widely and laughing, staring up at fantastic trees, and the forest seemed ridiculous, as it tends to do. I was happy she was having a good time with it.

I had told her that after 4 hours or so, the effects would start to fade out, and we’d be sober enough to cook dinner, start a fire, and re-inflate our leaky air mattress. That’s how it had always worked for me before.

This time, things took an unexpected turn.

Instead of returning to normal, my sense of reality grew increasingly ethereal and dreamlike, so that when I got out of my hammock and went to sit at the picnic table, I was 100% convinced my body was still in the hammock and that I had only imagined moving to the table.

I had to pee, but I figured I couldn’t — because my actual body was still in the hammock. If this projection of me walked over and peed on a tree, my real body would surely wet itself. So I held it in.

I was in this state for several hours, and it got a lot weirder.

My wife was sobering up and she became frustrated with me because I couldn’t even attempt the tasks I said I’d help with. I don’t think she understood what I was experiencing, and I sure couldn’t explain it.

She attempted to start the fire by herself, and it burned for a little while. I don’t remember what happened with dinner. Finally, it got dark and we went to bed on our deflated air mattress.

The campground was busier than I’d anticipated. Cars were driving by with bright lights, people were shouting, kids were running around, and it felt like being in the center of a lot of chaos. The tent wasn’t enough to block out all the activity. What if those cars and lights were the police? In combination with my wife’s frustration and my full bladder, the chaos was distressing.

Mustn’t wet the hammock…

I started to feel scared. What was happening to me? Why was I in this unfamiliar dream state? How could I reunite with my body?

My wife was of no help. If I turned to her for comfort, she scolded me. I began to wonder if this would ever end. I thought about the new job I was supposed to start in two days and wondered if I’d ever be normal enough to go to work.

Why was this going on for so long, hours past when I expected to be sober again? It shouldn’t happen like this.

I tried falling asleep but couldn’t get comfortable, mentally or physically.

Finally, I just couldn’t hold my bladder anymore. I had to go, urine-soaked hammocks be damned. I stood up in the tent and unzipped my pants, preparing to pee right where I stood. There was no point in going outside the tent, of course, because my body was still in the hammock either way.

My wife jumped up. “NO NO NO! Don’t do that! Go outside!” she unzipped the tent door and led me outside, illuminating the ground in front of me with a flashlight. “Do it here.” She commanded me and I helplessly obeyed. I felt like I was a dog being potty-trained — ashamed, and scolded for doing the wrong thing.

This cycle repeated itself at least one more time, me standing up to pee, her leading me outside. By this time, she was fed up with me and I perceived all of her body language and verbal language as pure contempt. I was scared and uncomfortable and when I looked for comfort she was a cold wall. There was nothing I could do but lie there and keep suffering and wait for something to change.

A terrible idea dawned on me.

Was I … dead? Is this what it’s like, ingesting the wrong mushrooms, fading into death? In fact, what other explanation could there be?

I became more and more convinced that this was the most likely scenario. I had somehow died, and was now sentenced to this hell, or purgatory, or whatever it was. I would be trapped in this scary little tent, with my wife as my unsympathetic prison guard, for the rest of eternity. That was my fate now.

I contemplated this, and I wondered: well, does it matter in the end? Sure, it will suck for me to be here suffering, but that’s only from my perspective, and I’m just a tiny little thing. Compared to the whole human organism, I’m like an eyebrow hair or a bit of dead skin that has scrubbed off. Life will go on for the rest of the world even if I’m here suffering forever. Maybe it’s no big deal on the grand scale. I guess I can accept that.

Eventually, I managed to drift off to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning my reality was back to normal. I’ve remained firmly inside my body ever since (except for some Salvia experiences). In the 20 times I’ve taken mushrooms since then, nothing like this has happened to me again.

I say that things went back to normal, but I suspect this trip had lasting effects on me and on my marriage.

Looking back as I write this, I’m surprised by a few things I never noticed before. My wife got upset with my incapacitation, but why didn’t she ask me if I was OK and give me a hug? That would have helped a lot. If I was having a bad trip, and she was sobering up, why couldn’t she have figured out how to re-inflate the mattress by herself? Why did she need my participation so badly?

Of course, she couldn’t understand what I was going through, so I don’t totally blame her. It was also unwise of me to take a full dose while trip-sitting a first-timer. I should have stayed sober or only tripped lightly and made sure that she had all her needs met as the first priority. Lesson learned for next time.

Still, it seems significant that the underlying connection between us was not one of support and understanding by default.

Maybe this trip is when I started to wonder how sound our marriage was. We were very young when we got married, and much had changed for both of us in the few years that had passed. Was my perception of her as a prison guard a metaphor for feeling trapped in the relationship? Was my sense of her coldness not completely illusory?

The funny thing is that we tripped together other times after this and generally had positive experiences. I doubt our divorce is directly traceable to my bad trip in any meaningful way, but I am curious what effect it had.

The marriage question was significant, but the biggest change to my perspective was something else.

I developed greater empathy for all humans and other lifeforms who regularly exist in a state where they feel trapped and powerless.

Normally, I’m lucky to have decent mental health; I can get depressed and anxious sometimes, but my baseline state is relatively calm, secure, and realistic. Simply by altering my brain chemistry, I entered a realm where I was convinced that reality was far more sinister than it was.

Some people suffer from delusions every day. Their brains persuade them that everyone is out to get them, monsters are jeering at them, horrible accidents are coming, or they have no choice but to stay in abusive situations. I’ve never lived with a mental health problem like that, and I doubt the mushrooms were an accurate simulation, but my trip revealed to me how absolutely horrifying life can be when there’s something just a little bit off in your brain.

Some people can truly never escape their delusions. They experience something similar to my time trapped in the tent on a daily basis. That’s brutal! All I had to do was sleep for a few hours to escape from it, but that option doesn’t exist for them.

This realization made me more concerned about how we care for the people in our society who are mentally ill and unable to take good care of themselves. It’s shaped my perspectives on topics like politics, health care, economics, and homelessness.

If we’re so vastly wealthy as a society and yet we can’t be bothered to make sure that the most helpless and agonized humans are receiving the best help they can get… what the hell are we doing? Where are our priorities? Nobody wants to suffer personally, yet we so easily ignore the cries of others.

I hope I don’t have to live through a bad trip like this again, but I am so grateful for what I learned. I now have a huge amount of respect for anyone who copes with schizophrenia, PTSD, and other conditions that turn neutral situations into terrifying ones. I’ve got things easy by comparison, and I want to help.