Forget scrambled eggs! THIS is your brain on drugs.

Anyone who has seen the movie Children of Men will recognize this scene: We're walking down a shadowy path. Many people move around us as we walk towards the bright spotlights up ahead. I can see people and trees trapped behind the chainlink fence to my right. Under the lights a few people are rudly directing the members of the crowd one way or the other. I suddenly realize that if we get sent to the right we will be entering what is essentially a death camp. We got to the crossing, and were sorted to the right. "I'm going to die," I thought. I knew it was true. There was no way to make it out of here alive. My mind caved in. "I'm going to die." The path we were on got darker and darker. The farther we went the more terrified I became. When it became so dark that I could no longer see the rest of my body the fear seemed to swallow me. In the moment before I broke down completely something occured to me. I could, I realized, accept that I was going to die. I could accept that there was no way out, and I could resolve to do it gracefully. Kicking and screaming never helped anyone, I reasoned. This thought made so much sense that I calmed down. Why spend the last minutes of my life terrified beyond reason? If I could not enjoy them then I could at least live them fearlessly. And if there was actually some sort of afterlife I would be able to be proud of the way I died.

That ten minutes on the path was the most pivotal part of my shroom trip. I realized the next day how much I had managed to learn. I realized that if I had not accepted that I was going to die my trip would have turned very bad. I truely thought that I was going to die. It never crossed my mind that I would not. That I was able to find the strength to accept this fact was amazing to me. I now know that I have the potential to react this way when I finally am dying.
It was also very interesting to me that I could control the outcome of my trip as much as I did. Some part of me knew that I needed to calm myself before things got ugly. The trip itself had started really well, with no indications that I would later be facing death.

Yesterday afternoon my roomate Jen, her dog Frida and I ventured into San Fransisco for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. At the park we met up with a friend of Jen's (who's name I cannot remember), and many friends of this friend. After introducing ourselves we kicked off our shoes and sat down on the large threadbare blanket that had been spread on the ground. Almost immediately people began to produce bowls and pipes, and we broke up into many "getting to know each other" conversations.

The words "shroom chocolates" were all I managed to pick out of the conversation going on next to me. I had been talking to a few of the blanket people about my art, but suddenly the concept of shroom laced chocolate had my full attention. Jen's friend had pulled out a round, foil wrapped object that was presumably the chocolate in question. Seeing that I was interested she told me that one of the guys on the other end of the blanket was selling them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

For a long time now I've been meaning to try mushrooms. My experiences with LSD have been wonderful, but there is something to be said for the fact that shrooms are natural, while acid is synthetic. I wanted to see if that made a difference. So I bought some chocolate. I ate half of it to start with, feeling very glad that I had declined to smoke any pot when a bowl was passed in my direction. I didn't want to mix the two drugs just yet. I don't really remember what happened for a while right after I ate the chocolate. I just know that when I finally looked up I realized that I had been drawing on my hands for some time. I got up to watch the band that was playing and the effects seemed to hit me at that moment. The sun was beginning to set and the strips of pink clouds weren't behaving quite right. They seemed to be staying still, but at the same time gave the impression that they were itching to scurry off across the sky. As I was watching them I absentmindedly raised myself up on my tip toes. I gasped and looked around, and then stumbled. For a moment it had felt as if I was flying. But I was still on the ground. I shook my head, trying to reconcile being in the air on on the ground at the same time. The sensation was unsettling, but interesting enough that I did it over and over in order to have that feeling of grounded flight.

At this point I hadn't had any strong visual hallucinations, and I never ended up having any. What happened was more than a visual hallucination. It was a total sensory hallucination. It was as if I had created another reality for myself to exist in, where my senses acted differently. Listening to the music gave me the feeling of being in water, or being filled with it. Sound was translated into a tactile sensation. The sounds of the large crowd and of the music combined made me feel very full, as if every last bit of space in my body had been filled with some sort of jelly-like substance. As the sounds waned, so did the feeling. Some visual stimulus also translated into tactile hallucination. A person in the crowd was playing with a green laser, and every time I saw the light skitter past I felt someone grab my head and shake it, jarring my brain.
I felt at this point that I could safely experiment with a little pot, so I packed a bowl and took a few hits. It was almost dark and the band was playing a beautiful song, so I got up and danced. Jen, the nameless friend and I danced barefoot in the grass until the last song. And then we kept dancing to the music in our heads.

During the walk out of the park I slipped from my audio/tactile reality into the CoM reality. When I finally made it into a new reality I found that there was new music in my head. And I danced to it.