This was originally a post on cohost.

I had shrooms for the first time today. I started a thread on Mastodon about halfway through until the end but I kind of wanted to restate everything in once place again. also I just think it was really neat and I wanna keep talking about it lol

• I had 1 gram of Golden Teacher × Hawaiian, consumed by monch monch cronch cronch yum. it tasted like an air-fried mushroom snack with just a little bitterness. if I had any I would’ve added just a little salt. overall trip was 4.5 hours, ramping up at the 45-minute mark and ramping down at 4 hours, peaking at about 2.5 hours in. personally I think that was a little long and someone recommended lemon tekking (??) for smth shorter
• standard euphoria similar to cannabis at the beginning and the end, the giggly sort of kind. funnily enough into the middle that gave way to a more calm and even sort of pleasant feeling
• visual distortion comes in the form of mostly stretching and swirling, or melty kind of movement, but recognizable patterns seem to retain their form. I spent some time staring at writing on a whiteboard, and the stretching and swirling disturbed the arrangement of the letters but not the letters themselves
• you’ll really realize how much pattern recognition is built into perception because distortion and movement remains consistent with the patterns! a striped carpet with alternating arrangements swirled in ways consistent with the existing pattern, following the directions of how they were arranged; a speckled ceiling pulsed sort of in circles bc the speckles were arranged sort of grid-like in a tiling manner
• there were also visual effects closing my eyes as long as there was enough light through my eyelids. that was curious seeing as staring at a blank wall didn’t produce anything. I guess the backs of eyelids are still textured enough. it was neat closing my eyes and moving my head since the moving light source would trigger hallucinated movement
• external senses are amplified (e.g. brighter hues as if you dragged a saturation slider up, ambient noises are more forefront, strong smells are more piercing), but some internal sense are suppressed (e.g. hunger, whatever you call the sense of need-to-pee). I think at a higher dose this combination of amplified and suppressed sense would’ve led to some sort of dissociative or out-of-body experience
• in the middle my hands got REALLY cold (and thermoception was probably amplified too) which was really annoying. I suspect it also messes with blood pressure and that was the cause; I think it would be interesting to record heart rate and blood pressure throughout the trip
• friend who I was tripping with had some synesthesia, music producing visuals I think. I didn’t have any interaction between senses unfortunately, I think that would’ve been really cool
• there’s also some time distortion, in the sense that less time seemed to pass than I always thought, but it also felt like things froze when I was staring at something for too long, especially in my peripheral vision. the resulting phenomenon is when you see someone glancing at you out of the corner of your eye sometimes it feels like they’re staring at you even if they weren’t. I can totally see how this could cause some paranoia especially in a crowd when it feels like everyone is secretly staring at you
• I was so tired afterwards! even though I spent most of that time sitting down staring at things and listening to music with my eyes closed, I felt physically tired at the end of it somehow, I have no idea why
• I think one of the big plusses is having full consciousness about what I was experiencing and the ability to recognize my experiences as effects of the shrooms. although I don’t think I would’ve been able to do any actual work I was able to keep posting to my thread (and strangely enough my phone was completely visdually undistorted), and being able to think about what I was experiencing while I was experiencing is just really neat and fun! I’m sure I’ve heard of other hallucinogens where reality is difficult to distinguish, which to me sounds more like psychosis and something I really would not have liked

overall the experience was v entertaining and I’d do it again, probably not in the near future and maybe during the summer to avoid feeling cold during the trip. for the next time I’d probably do it alone (having people around is just kind of distracting lol), and prepare some nice patterned surfaces for me to look at, as well as more writing bc swirling letters is p fun. also lots of blankets.