true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
The second, and in many ways more puzzling, major mushroom experience that we shared in Hawaii brought to an end any further
exploration of psilocybin until after our return from the Peruvian Amazon. It was the twenty-third of December, the day before Dennis would
arrive to spend the Christmas holidays with us. Kat and I each took five dried grams and settled down before the fireplace to await the first
wave of images. Soon we were deep into it. The mushroom was showing me a watery, blue-green planet with no land except a globe-girdling
archipelago at the equator—a kind of super-Indonesia. Accompanying the views of the planet was a narration explaining that this oxygen-rich
world was within one hundred light years of earth and was totally uninhabited by higher animals. As the implications of this last bit of data
came home, I felt a wave of acquisitiveness that seemed to come right out of my primate gonads, a reaction to a million years of nomadism
and the restless swelling of human populations. The narration was explaining that when the symbiotic fusion of humanity and the Stropharia
was completed, "the human beings" would be free to claim such planets for the Strophariad.
The narration had become personified into the inner voice that attends the mushroom trance. With it I began a discussion of the view of the
watery planet and the technology such views implied. I wondered about the technology of star-travel and remote imaging. I asked the
mushroom whether, for all the extravagant images it is able to bestow, could it produce any effect in the normal continuum?
I had the idea that if we should go outside, as we usually did at some point in our journeys, we might see some continuation of the
cloud-related phenomenon that had been a part of the experience at La Chorrera. Kat complained of being very hot and agreed that we should
go outdoors. We were very unsteady on our feet, and though Kat said very little, I felt considerable alarm for her. However I assumed that
going outdoors would be sufficient to cool her off.
Outside, we stood unsteadily in the front yard. The night was overcast. Kat seemed to be lapsing in and out of consciousness. It was becoming
harder and harder to rouse her. She kept saying that they were burning her, but that she thought she could hold them back. Finally, she
collapsed altogether and I could not get any response. We were so isolated that it was impossible to get any sort of outside help. It would have
taken hours to get anyone there, and doubtless no one on the entire island knew more than we did about psilocybin. The overwhelming gestalt
of the situation was that somehow we had been placed in the scales of life and death, and that whatever was to be done was to be done by us
alone and within the next very few minutes.
I remembered that at the back of the house, near where we were accustomed to sunbathing, there was a large tub of water, which held the
overflow from our rainwater collecting system. Even though I knew that we were in the face of a mortal threat, it required a complete
organization of my consciousness to think of emptying that water over Kat. But as soon as I thought of it, it seemed to give the swirling world
a direction. I picked her up in a single, sweeping motion and carried her, lurching through the dark, past the spiky palms now fantastic in the
darkness. The moment was excruciatingly grotesque: my drawstring pants had fallen about my ankles so that I walked bare-assed and stifflegged
like Frankenstein's monster, carrying unconscious Kat.
I laid her on the ground and began to empty can after can of clear, black and silver silken water over every inch of her. It was immediately
apparent that we had found the antidote to whatever was making her feel a burning sensation and dragging her into unconsciousness. We
tearfully and joyously embraced there in the water and mud, both sensing that this very uncharacteristic effect of the mushroom had been a
close call. As we knelt together, realizing that we had surmounted the difficulty that had confronted us, a wild peal of unearthly sound—a
howling laughter—split the
air from the direction of the ancient woods behind the house. This laughter was like the scream of a panic-inducing god. Eldrich, amoral, mad
—the throaty battle cackle of the unleashed fiend. We fled.
We stumbled back into the house, and I made us tea while Kat talked to me and candidly confided that what she was experiencing "must be
what it is like to be insane." She described having very frank hallucinations with her eyes open, strange "tangible" fern and orchid-like forms
were growing and twisting out of every available surface. The previous sensation of heat continued, but it had changed into a field of whitehot
potential energy that could be held away from burning contact with her body only by allowing the hallucinogenic energy to spend itself in
a chaos of weird and explicit images. Only by applied concentration could she hold the burning plasma at bay a few feet away from her, where
it became a skin of vision that encompassed everything else. After a few minutes of this Kat again seemed to be fading, and so we drew a cold
bath and she lay in that for awhile until the symptoms again abated.
When later we talked it became apparent that her experience had dimensions for her that had not been apparent to me. From the moment we
had first stepped out of the house, she discovered that the sensation of heat had not diminished but grown stronger. She noticed that directly
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