Mushrooms

I started with micro-dosing. This is generally defined as taking a sub-perceptual dose, a dose that you don’t really feel, but is working on your brain. Mycologist Paul Stametts is one of the leading authorities on mushrooms and recommends the Stammets Stack as a protocol for micro-dosing which includes dosage, timing, and additional supplements that augment it. I tried this for about 4 months and felt a little better, but it eventually wore off and I stopped. To this day I genuinely do not know if it really made me feel better, or if it was a placebo effect because I expected to feel better. I understand that research doesn’t support either conclusion, but there are a great many people who report success with micro-dosing and I do not challenge their results.

At about age 58 I got some more mushrooms and tried higher (perceptual) doses. I started at half a gram of dried pan cubensis mushroom. There are 2 main types of psilocybin mushrooms, pan cubensis and pan cyensis. The pan cubensis are the most common and what you can typically buy because they are the easiest to grow. There are many different varieties of pan cubensis (penis envy, golden teacher, blue meanie, jack frost, etc..) and new ones are being added all the time as enthusiasts cross breed more. And all of them have differing levels of psilocybin in them, so do your research if you try taking them.

In any case, half a gram is a very safe starting dose for dried cubensis. I got some very mild visuals, slightly more vivid colors, but the thing for me was music. I used to love music. but for many years music has just been a background sound and not something I enjoyed. Suddenly music was something I loved again. It was more vivid, and I could hear nuances to the music I had never heard before. When the dose wore off, it didn’t sound as amazing but I still loved it. Mushrooms gave me music again.

After this, about once a month or so, I set aside a weekend day to try a bit more, going up a quarter to half a gram more each trip. Visuals got way more interesting and music better than I had ever imagined. There were also short term  (a few days) improvements in my mood after each session, but no lasting changes. Again, I had no counseling and no integration because professionals are not allowed to work with illegal substances.

There are studies that show that mushrooms can make long lasting changes to your brain, forming new connections, and other things. In listening to an interview with Robin Carhart Harris, a researcher in this field, I learned that testing has shown that it requires at least 2.5 grams before lasting changes are noted. This is of course imprecise because mushrooms are like hot peppers, you don’t know how strong one is until you eat one. I decided to try my first 3 gram trip. This is somewhat of a tipping point with mushrooms. The point where you can somewhat lose yourself in the trip. People argue about terms like “ego death”, what it means, and what dose is required to achieve it. I don’t believe my ego died that day, but I definitely visited another realm of my mind.

In taking the mushrooms, I followed the Johns Hopkins protocol. I laid down in a dark room with an eye mask on, and listened to their playlist on Spotify. The rhythm and intensity of the music (no words/lyrics) is supposed to guide you through your trip. I was aware of myself, and could force awareness of my body throughout the trip, but I also felt myself to be somewhere else. It was very chaotic and felt like I was trapped in a box. At some point I remember being convinced that I was such a broken person that “they” were not going to let me come back and were going to replace me. I have no idea who “they” were and I remember just being resigned to my fate. Of course I came back, and I was happy for a while just out of sheer relief. 

I did a few more trips like this, always with similar results. It was always chaotic and I was always trapped in a box. It took these trips and the help of both my wife and my psychologist to realize that the box was my life and it was made up of everything I had done in life to trap myself. This was a very powerful realization, but mushrooms were not giving me the guidance as to how to untrap myself.

I should note here that mushrooms affect everyone differently. I have introduced them to my wife and other friends, though none of them have gone much higher than a gram. My wife and her best friend both have amazing trips, have no chaos, and are able to work on issues and get answers from mushroom trips.