Back Down the Rabbit Hole
Tuesday was another trip day. A trip night, in fact.
I don't normally trip on weekdays, because I have too much else that needs attention. There are dog walks, laundry, garden watering, dinner and companionable time with my husband, talking and watching TV. I don't normally trip at night, because it tends to leave me energized and makes it difficult to sleep. However, I have a quiet night all alone at home, my husband is busy off doing gay naked yoga and fellowshipping with friends over wings and beers after they finished their choir rehearsal, and I decide to go back down the rabbit hole.
I follow my instincts on this, mixing my medicines with an eye toward the experience I want. I take two grams of PE7 aborts (yeah, THOSE aborts) and powder them, and mix them with the juice of a fresh lemon, and let it set for ten minutes. I add some sugar and a little water, and then chug the mess including all the mushroom material, swilling out the glass with some additional water. I take one 15mg Δ9THC gummy. I have been fasted since lunch. Fasting always adds a layer for me; I tend to get further, and have more ethereal, floaty, and mystical experiences. It also tends to bias my trips more toward the spiritual and less toward the emotional; more airy, less earthy.
I walk the dogs. This usually gives me just about the right amount of time for things to kick in; I like feeling the come-up happening as I'm moving around outside, hearing nature sounds and enjoying the feel of the breeze on my skin. I smell the trees and the blooming flowers; I see the birds wheeling across the sky and hear the crows calling. Our new dog Lucy, whom we rescued after a friend of a friend died from cancer, is fitting in well with our little pack; she's learning how to walk on a slack lead, although squirrels still occupy her mind way more than I want them to. I putter around the house a little, looking at the garden, feeling the buzz starting in my hands and feet and face. When the light show begins in earnest, I go upstairs to the big bed with the curtains and lie down.
The two girl dogs come with me; the two boys follow later. Jackie is my heart dog, and she's a trusted companion when I'm in the mushroom - she is very focused, like a working dog when it's on duty. She seems to have a deep understanding of the altered state that I'm in when I trip, and she gives me love and support and doesn't leave my side. I can look at her, and she has extra eyes going up her forehead and onto her ears; my husband sees them too when he's in the mushroom. In normal daily life she can be somewhat needy and neurotic, but when the psilocybin takes me over, she presses firmly against me and won't leave my side. Sometimes she'll lick my skin just once or twice, letting me know she's there. Lucy settles between my legs, and this time Jackie curls beside the pillow on my husband's side of the bed, not touching me. Jackie has had some emotional adjustment issues with the new dog, much the same as when a family has a new baby and the previous youngest child is no longer the baby. We've been giving her extra love and attention, but it's challenging because the new girl has essentially no training or manners, so we're working on many fronts at once.
I start the breathwork script. I've downloaded it to an audio-only file on my phone just so that there's zero chance of being interrupted if the internet freaks out; I've learned this helps me give me some peace of mind in situations where I may not be in full control of my faculties. I feel excited about this trip; the emotion is almost like I'm running downhill toward home. I am grinning constantly. Jason's voice directs me to set an intention; again as before, I want to reconnect with my sexuality, my vital energy, and clear the blockages to that flow which have built up over years of emotional trauma, stress, sadness, and grief. I want the spring of creativity flowing through me again like it used to do, and I want my sexual generative power to crackle off the tips of my fingers like it has in the past. I've been where I want to be again; it's familiar territory. I've been the Magician in the Tarot, and I am going back there. Solve et coagula; as above, so below.
I realize, as I'm starting to deeply breathe and then pant through the cycles of hyperventilation and breath holding, that I'm still fully dressed - I was so keen to get going that I'm still wearing everything including my belt. I peel out of my clothes layer by layer without even sitting up, scattering them around the bed. Feeling more liberated once I'm naked except for my socks (my feet get cold), I continue. I move a lot, touching my body, doing a kind of lying dance as the energy moves through me, scrubbing my face and rubbing the skin of my arms, my shoulders, my belly, my legs, my chest with my hands. The light show of the psilocybin is given a depth and vibrato by the buzz and hum of the THC, and the DMT released by the breathwork explodes like sparks. I try later to explain to some of my psychonaut friends how this feels - it's not quite the same as watching a firework show during a thunderstorm while the wind whips the sparks up from your bonfire and the rain drums on your skin, but it's got that kind of multisensory feeling, multiple channels of sensation rushing and pummeling and flooding through me all at once. It's a LOT. When Jason comes to the end, the final breath hold, I wish that I had a stopwatch - I probably hold my breath for three minutes, and I'm launched into space. The sense of ego dissolution is intense. In the transcendent peace at the end, he guides you to meditate and think about things, and I pull Jackie to me, holding her and talking with her about how she will always be special to me, and although Lucy will also be my dog and will be a part of our pack, it does not diminish the love I have for Jackie, or make her less in my heart. I hope that she's able to receive some of this earnest communication - I always worry when I'm tripping that I will sound like some stereotyped stoner from a TV show, "Whoah, DUUUUUDE, lookit the pretty colors" - because I FEEL a certain amount of that kind of stupefying awe - but what tends to come out of my mouth is much more about psychology, mythology, archetypes, and the like. I talk a LOT. It's typically fairly cogent; I manage my clauses and close my parentheses.
Once my capsule has returned to earth, I chat with my mushroom friends on my phone, dictating my sentences so that the text populates the little window, struggling line by line to make it come out correct as the letters literally dance and writhe as they move across the screen. I have mislaid my glasses somewhere during my explosive undressing, and I know that if I sit up and turn on the lights and look for them, the beautiful visuals will go away, and they're unlikely to return. My age-related presbyopia is such that I only need glasses to read, but I DO need glasses to read - I manage to get by with squinting and focusing through the layer of tears on the surface of my eyelids, distorting the lens by squeezing my eyelids to change the focal length. I cry very often when I trip; part of it is just awe at the beauty, but much of it is the deep emotional work that's going on, letting go of decades of pain and emotional scarring, rewiring my brain bit by bit.
Tonight's trip feels remarkably profound, and I go on to visit with my friends about my journeys with psychotherapy, my experiences with the dogs, how Lucy appears to be shaping up to be a very good tripping dog, about how I need to schedule a visit with my psychiatrist. I haven't felt like I NEED a psychiatrist, but I do feel like I want to visit with him. I want him to see how I've changed; I want him to read this blog. I want him to make notes in my case file, in case this informs his work any, or gives him an insight that he can share with some other patient struggling in the dark. I am definitely a one-rat study at this point, poking myself in the brain to see where I twitch. I'm not interested in turning over my mental-health care to a controlled study situation where I'm given specified doses of chemicals, but I would be more than happy to have my records compared and contrasted, to have my before and after looked at. He knows how I responded to SSRI's and SNRI's and benzodiazepines; I would value his insights on how I have responded to psychedelics. I wouldn't mind being reassessed for measures related to depression, anxiety, and autism spectrum disorder. Plus - I've never actually met the man. He took over my psychiatric care during the pandemic, and all of our visits were virtual, so I've never been in his office, never shaken his hand. I appreciate the fact that his care has always been insightful, collaborative, and compassionate; he explained the mechanisms of action of every chemical we trialed, and admitted that he was punching in the dark, trying to find something that would help with an acceptable level of collateral noise. He understood when I told him that the side effects - ranging from emotional blunting to a complete disinterest in sex or creating any kind of artwork - were an unacceptable tradeoff for feeling less sad. He told me that he felt like my situation was probably not an actual treatable chemical imbalance, not something that the tools at his disposal were able to touch. He could soothe my discomfort, but always at a cost; I likened it to trying to cook dinner wearing gardening gloves, every motion clumsy and difficult. He felt that the core issues -- emotional trauma, patterns of fear and anxiety built up over years, the history of bullying and insecurity -- were the real problem, and that I wouldn't be able to get substantial relief until I could somehow process them. He said that he felt ketamine might be beneficial, but that the nasal spray esketamine treatment that my insurance would cover is less helpful than the infusion ketamine that you have to take by IV at a doctor's office, which insurance usually will NOT cover. I asked him about mushrooms, because I had already been doing the reading about them before I started with him, and he thought they might be what I needed.
They were what I needed.
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