1.2g APE with my girlfriend.. And why a trip sitter is important.

For context, my experience with tolerance has been pretty inconsistent. My very first trips were overwhelmingly intense because I severely underestimated the medicine's potency (took ~3g my first trip, and ~2g my second). Experiencing that alone was deeply unsettling, so I shifted to taking much smaller doses (0.3g–0.5g). To my surprise, that unfortunately resulted in a string of very weak experiences, so I took a full one-month break to reset. Over the past two weeks, starting late last week and running through this week, I’ve been experimenting and dosing much more frequently than ever before.

The following describes my past three experiences tripping with or around people, and just my past three experiences in general.

The first trip was with my friend, I'll call him Matt. The night before, I had rolled a blunt with some mid weed and Swishers, but since we were near New Buffalo, I went to the dispensary and got a cheap preroll. My boy Matt also brought some blunts rolled up with some alright weed. We smoked those down to the roaches from 8 to 10 PM. Then, we put my blunt, the preroll, and one of his blunts into my corncob pipe, which we savored until 2 AM. Right around then, we had an idea: we should do some mushrooms.

I initially protested. We had my cousin's 21st birthday to go to at his mom's house at 1 PM. Him and my mom were going to be drinking, and we’d just be sitting there with our dicks in our hands since we aren't 21. It was an outside party, though, so it wasn't the worst thing in the world. Before I knew it, we both fell asleep. I woke up at 7 AM, and he followed soon after. We smoked the other blunt roach that we hadn't put in the corncob the night before. As we sobered up around 9 AM, we started thinking, and he asked me again to do mushrooms. I told him I didn't think it was a good idea because of the party at 1 PM, but he promised we'd only take a small amount.

Now, I wasn't completely worried. I have ADHD, and to calm me down after I tweak all day, my doctors prescribed me Trazodone, which happens to be an excellent trip killer. We both had one in our pockets the whole time. We sat in the hotbox we had made earlier to finish the roach and savor it, but with our pile of mushrooms sitting right in front of us, we decided to just take a few. I hadn't measured them, despite recently acquiring a scale, because even though they are strong, we both have a mid-level of experience with this strain in particular. I'd say we took about 1g of the darkest-looking caps. I tend to find the caps hit faster, I assume due to the higher psilocin and alkaloid-to-psilocybin ratio of the strain and in the caps directly.

And oh boy, this was unlike anything I had experienced. I feel like whenever I do it alone, my soul craves people. I've gotten unsettled before (probably from doing crazy doses), but doing a low dose alone just feels... uneventful. Having a person there that I was close to gave it meaning. We started looking around my room as we came up, and it happened quite fast. I started feeling odd. My body always feels soft and squishy on mushrooms; I describe it as "teddy hallucinations," where even the ground starts to get not just a shape, but the vibe of a teddy bear. It is strange lmfao, and that's exactly the thing. For example, when I pet my cat, she felt extra soft, and Matt also described that same feeling to me. With him right there, he said, "I giggle a lot on mushrooms." So as to not be weird, I also started giggling, and honestly, it started working. I began to get more comfortable with the weirdness, and it felt very freeing.

As time approached for the party, I asked him about taking the trip killer beforehand. We both laughed, and he said he wanted to go. He wanted to go like this? I thought he was crazy. I had gotten some light static vision when me and my boy went into my walk-in closet to test low-level light, but I wasn't tripping too hard; I just felt very free. I actually had a great time and talked with my family. It was very simple and went surprisingly well.

Two days later, it happened to be Father's Day, and I craved mushrooms again. I wanted to take a mid-dose and see more of the visuals I had seen a few days prior. I went to my mushroom stash and measured a gram and a half of a huge mushroom with a mighty cap, the cap was almost half its size, and its gills were almost black! A gram and a half seemed like way too much, so I took about 0.5g instead.

I went out on a walk, but right beforehand, I texted my dad, "Happy Father's Day," of course. I haven't talked to my dad in a while. There's no animosity, but we’ve sort of drifted apart. Then, my stomach began to tear itself apart. I was sober except for some weed I had chosen to smoke beforehand, but I suddenly had to shit. That feeling of needing to shit turned into excruciating pain, which was thankfully relieved at the local train station quite quickly.

But then my father texted me asking to hang out. I thought I felt the mushrooms a little bit, but by now I figured I should feel more. Thinking this was just a subvisual dose (I had never really gotten visuals before, other than overwhelming ones once in the past), I was kinda disappointed. I tried to make the most of it by going to see my dad. I was kinda upset with him for not reaching out to me during this time, but it was odd: when I went to head over to the family gathering with him, now the fucking mushrooms kicked in. In the car, instead of being upset, I just started experiencing and reacting to my situations. I mean, I always do that, but I seemed to do it very literally with the experience around me.

I asked him about how he and my mom met. At the family gathering, I talked to my sister freely. My brother asked me to set up a Nintendo Switch, and after fucking with it for about 15 minutes, I'd never touched one in my life lmao.. I got it set up. We played and had a great time; it all felt new, like I was a kid again. I chose to forgive my father. That day as well, I got a lot of visuals. It just felt like my mind was wandering and creating random shit, but I was more focused on being in the moment to really pay attention to them. Weirdly, it ended up being my first productive visual trip.

Then, two days later, my girlfriend came over. I hadn't seen her in weeks due to me going on a summer trip, so naturally, with me taking mushrooms frequently and her being on probation and unable to smoke weed, she wanted to do them, and of course, I followed. We picked out and measured 1.2g each (2.4g total), mixed them, and ate them.

Honestly, her trip was pretty uneventful. I believe it's because it was only her second time. Things felt soft for her, and they sort of blended, but there weren't any sharp, exact visual structures. That's how I've always felt too (like with Matt), except for the last time I took them and went to my father's, but I wasn't really paying attention to the visuals then.

This time I did, and the mushrooms definitely wanted to take me deep at first. But with my girlfriend there, and keeping in mind what I learned last time... well, it's different when people tell you they can't hurt you versus when you actually experience them changing your reality. For me, even as your brain is getting mixed up, if your visual cortex gets data from your hearing or emotions... all it knows how to do is paint a picture. So, hallucinations are really just your brain trying to be productive with that data. I just went with the flow, and my girlfriend and I lay there in silence for a few hours, giggling while watching Ginny & Georgia, but most importantly, just being there for each other. I tripped balls btw. close eye visuals were the most prominent thing but then i looked out the window and the tree leaves turned to fractals, but its hard to describe beyond that.

TL;DR: I think mushrooms should be taken with people. The serotonergic capabilities are beautiful.