[Blueflame1986]

Okay we all know shrooms are an amazing psychadelic that can be really fun and enjoyable. But, you need to know how to take them properly and safely. This is a Faq from a lot of diffrent sites on the web that I have thrown together into one page. Feel free to correct anything that is not absolete, and add all the info you can! Theres a list of all the refrences at the bottom of the page.

Dosage -

Always start with low doses -- and continue for at least for the first couple of times. Some people might be familiar with LSD-25. Well they are bit similar, but still very different. I'd recommend about 20 Ps. semilanceatas or 2-3 dried grams, 2-3 dry g.'s for Psilocybe cubensis, 1-2 dry g.'s of Psilocybe cyanescens or about 3 g.'s of Ps. baeocystis. Increase the dose step by step, until you find the dose you are most comfortable with. There are people who never go for more than an ultra light trip, and some feel it must be an earthshattering experience. You'll probably find your dosage somewhere between these two extremes. The amounts of psilocin and -cybin vary. An extreme case:
"Me and a friend of mine were in a rave, and both had taken some mushrooms along. Semilanceatas... so at one point we decided to drink some mushroom tea, and both put 20 tiny mushrooms into our teas... I got nearly nowhere.. some funny effects, almost no dilation of pupils, very very light trip. My friend kept saying 'Wow' and 'What a trip', and some friends of ours tried to talk with him. Afterwards he said he didn't understand a word =). He said the trip was so intense it was as if he had consumed 60 semilanceatas."

Effects -



A trip from magic mushrooms will give you intensification of existing feelings, visual hallucinations and transformation of experience of time and place. It gives you the feeling that things are different than usual. You will notice things you normally don't, or just take for granted. The things you see, hear or do are much more intense. You can see new perspectives or get feelings of insight, but mostly it causes a lot of laughter because all thess things you see are much funnier

The Intensity of a Trip after use of psychedelic drugs can be divided in: Level 1:
This level produces a mild "stoning" effect, with some visual enhancement (i.e. brighter colours, etcetera). Some short term memory anomalies. Left/right brain communication changes causing music to sound "wider".

Level 2:
Bright colours and visuals (i.e. things start to move and breath), some 2 dimensional patterns become apparent upon shutting eyes. Confused or reminiscent thoughts. Change of short term memory leads to continual distractive thought patterns. Vast increase in creativity becomes apparent as the natural brain filter is bypassed.

Level 3:
Very obvious visuals, everything looking curved and/or warped patterns and kaleidoscopes seen on walls, faces etc. Some mild hallucinations such as rivers flowing in wood, grained or "mother of pearl" surfaces. Closed eye hallucinations become 3 dimensional. There is some confusion of the senses (i.e. seeing sounds as colours, etcetera). Time distortions and "moments of eternity".

Level 4:
Strong hallucinations, i.e. objects morphing into other objects. Destruction or multiple splitting of the ego. (Things start talking to you, or you find that you are feeling contradictory things simultaneously). Some loss of reality. Time becomes meaningless. Out of body experiences and e.s.p. type phenomena. Blending of the senses.

Level 5:
Total loss of visual connection with reality. The senses cease to function in the normal way. Total loss of ego. Merging with space, other objects, or the universe. The loss of reality becomes so severe that it defies explanation. The earlier levels are relatively easy to explain in terms of measureable changes in perception and thought patterns. This level is different in that the actual universe within which things are normally perceived, ceases to exist! Satori enlightenment (and other such labels).


Consumption -

Once ready for a trip after a yearlong meditation in the wilderness, one is confronted with a problem -- how to get that dry and unpleasant tasting stuff down?

• Honey & spices & water & mushrooms
  This one is a bit sweet but does a good job of covering the taste. Take a half glass of warm or cold water, three or more spoonfuls of honey, and according to taste, spices such as nutmeg, ginger and others. Grind the mushrooms with spices into fine powder, mix everything carefully and gulp down.
• Mushroom cacao
  Get some cacao beans/powder for this one. Warm some water to 40-60 C. Let the mushrooms steep in this water for about five minutes, fish 'em out and add cacao powder and mix well. Or you can grind mushrooms into fine powder. Sweeten with honey, and drink. Another variation is hot chocolate -- melt some chocolate in water instead of cacao.
• Mushroom tea
  Drown some groid dried mushrooms in hot water, wait five minutes, and drink. If you seriously dislike the taste of shrooms, just drink the water (although you'll lose part of the effect). I find that this is a good way of getting the shrooms down as well though, just dump in a baggy of strong tea and you won't taste a thing.
• Mushrooms & orange juice
  Blend an appropriate amount of fresh mushrooms and orange juice in a blender. The orange juice masks the taste quite well, the blender chops up the shrooms into tiny chunks so all the psilocybin is digested, and the vitamin C in the juice won't hurt either.
• Pizzas
  Just add fresh or dried mushrooms on top. Note that eating a lot adds to physical interference.
• Shroom powder and liquids of choice
  The finer you grind the shrooms, the better this works. Take a piece of paper and fold twice so you have a V-shape, and make a little pile of shroom powder on one end of it. Open your mouth and let the stuff flow in, then drink water/juice/tea/whatever to wash it down. Figure out an optimal pile size, and you can down the shrooms in record time with no taste and maximum psilocybin ingestion efficiency. Just be careful not to laugh or sneeze when holding the paper, otherwise you'll have to lick the carpet to get the powder... =)
• Chew & grind
  For this one, toss mushrooms into your mouth, chew well and swallow. The most efficient and simple method of mushroom ingestion. Dried mushrooms taste quite a bit more unpleasant than fresh ones.
• Other recipes
  I have heard about people making mushroom wine or mushroom chili. There are lots of foods you can put mushrooms into, but I'd recommend indulging in culinary pleasures after the trip. Also note that excessive heat breaks down psilocybin and psilocin, so always add the shrooms in after the food is cooked.

As you may have noted, except for the cheese on the pizza, none the recipes contain any milk or milk products. This is because several files and/or books have stated that calcium and/or fermented milk products interfere with psilocybin. Mind you, this is far from sure, if anybody can dig up a reference for (or against) this we'd appreciate it. But scientific proofs aside, the Aztec tradition of not eating before tripping is probably grounded in knowledge of possible adverse consequences, so don't eat too much, just enough to get the shrooms down.



Getting ready to trip -

There is a lot one can do to ensure a enjoyable voyage. People often talk about the "set and setting", squaking the three words like bunch of parrots and hardly giving much thought into their meaning. It's probably all the same whether you've ingested super-pure & fresh LSD-25 or nail-polishing fluid if the set and the setting aren't in condition.

• Packing
  Get into packing a couple of days before the voyage. Load your gear (brain) with everything you think will be useful. Personally I like documents about nature as they are easy to pack (video or TV). Books are fine but bit slower to load. Walking in nature, quiet and peaceful, and meditating ensures I get enough mental energy and happiness along. Try to break the normal circles of work, and if you are stressed, take few more days away from everything before leaving on the expedition. Go easy on your diet. Some fast for the previous week, others don't pay any attention to what and how much they eat. I eat normally until the day before, after which I eat mostly vegetables and fruits.
• Place
  Clean it up. Get some fresh air into it. Tell all your friends/relatives not to visit, and disconnect the doorbell and take the phone off the wall. Make everything as comfortable as possible. Fresh flowers will blow your mind with their beautiful looks and odors. A stroboscope is also worth a try, especially at 20 to 30 Hz. Lights are probably best low or off (and of white color). Music is so important we've given it its own section, coming up next.
• Flight
  Loose clothing and something to put on/take off; you'll be lying down most of the time, so pick something you could sleep in. Something to drink -- see if your drinks include caffeine or other chemicals. Water is always the best. Some light snacks to eat during the trip, and possibly something to fill your stomach after the trip. Drawing during take-off can be fun, also psychedelic videos. Anyway, for a real "trip" I say: after the takeoff, turn the lights off, turn the volume to the edge of subliminal, and relax & tune into the vibe of the Earth.

Music -

One of the important factors of the setting is music -- especially in urban environment music may be necessery to camouflage and change the every-day-soundscape. Music can tingle your imagination in a myriad different ways. Music can take you away, comfort or make you feel unbelievalably good. It can also make you sad, jumpy or angry. Therefore it is very important to make the right choice of music. There is tripping music and there is tripping music -- depending on the results one wishes to achieve. I will concentrate on the deeper side; music for shamanic voyages, spacetravels and intense mushroom-magic-trips. I speak from my own experience, thru my own frame of reference, so all of the material recommended might not be on your wavelength -- I was often skeptical myself but results often are awesome and surprising. Music you like during your normal states of conciousness is probably not ideal -- for instance lots of the ambient done today is not very nice for tripping, but probably ideal listening both before and after the trip. For a voyage try to find music that is calm, not too hectic or fast, not too structured and stays in the background if desired.

• Ambient
  Lots of music goes under this name today, and it may very hard to find something truly ambient among all those new ambient- techno/dub releases. All time favorites of mine and many others include Ashra Temple, John Cage, Cluster, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Steve Hillage, Daniel Lanois, Pink Floyd, David Toop & Max Eastley, Tangerine Dream and Tuu. Many music stores lump these under the heading "New Age" next to stuff like Yanni -- bleah. All of these move on the more serious tangents -- worth checking out. On the lighter, more techno side of the ambient -- try Aphex Twin, James Bernard, FFWD, Future Sound of London (FSOL), Pete Namlook, The Orb (especially the newer releases), William Orbit, Seafeel, Sun Electric or Terre Thaemlitz for instance.
• Ethno
  Music from the different cultures around the world and especially music by shamen or music aiming to a religious or spiritual experience -- shamanistic drumming, australian dijeridoo sounds or chantings by gregorian or buddhist monks, for instance. "Meditative music" compilations can be excellent. There are huge volumes of this sort of music published around the world.
• Minimalism, especially Terry Riley. Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Lamonte Young have all made "psychoacoustic music", to use a term developed by Brian Eno for his own music. Riley is especially...er... "beyond words" -- something unbelievalable. For connoisseurs.
• Silence, either complete or 'The music of the Mother Nature' -- best tripping music for as long there has been humans around to trip. The patter of raindrops falling surpasses just about any music humans can come up with. A must try. Perfect.

During the Trip -

Once you are in the air it is relatively easy to forget that you can alter the course of trip. Visuals and thoughts come and go, and everything follows some strangely familiar yet divine and unknown path. So one is left gawking at all this jaw open, as if watching TV. But changing pathways is easy -- provided you don't forget it is possible =) Always decide and ponder what you want to see and where you want to go before the experience. A shamanic voyage to the underworld is a snack, as is seeing the future. Usually every tripper forms his own way, follows his own paths, be it for good or evil. Anything is possible!


What to Expect -

Minutes after ingestion:
0 Ignition	Usually the first effects of psiloc[ybin/in] are perceivable after ten or twenty minutes. Funny or strange things may pop into your mind. One may feel very relaxed or like jumping all over the place. Next you may feel like you were blasting off, up towards the stars, rising high. Chewing the mushrooms for about ten minutes in your mouth enables the psilocybin and its analogues to enter the brain faster -- if the mushrooms are immediately swallowed, it may take as long as 1 hour for the first effects to set in.
20 Acceleration	If you get any physical symptoms, this is when they will hit. You can avoid or at least reduce nausea by not eating very much before the trip and not moving around too much during this phase. Throwing up is uncommon but not unheard of; having a barf bag around, especially on the first few trips, is a good idea. If you find that your body really doesn't like shrooms, a motion sickness pill (Dramamine and similar anti-histamines) beforehand may help. But don't worry about it too much, even if you feel queasy the nausea will end quite quickly.
40 Leaving the atmosphere	One will begin entering the realms of the experience; often the first real signs are simple hallucinations with the eyes closed or in darkness, little colored pixels floating around, etc. If one is going to go to the toilet, it should be done now.
70 Flight	1 hour is usually sufficient for the more powerful effects to set in. The body will feel heavy and drowsy.
130 Peak	After two hours the peak of the experience. Often quite awesome.
300 Deceleration	By now one will again start to remember the concepts of normal reality and may feel like getting something to drink and eat, or talk and do some moving about.
360 Touchdown	After about six hours most of the effects have disappeared and sleeping becomes possible.
12 h Reality	If you trip at night and fall asleep when the trip is ending, this is when you'll wake up... and the odds are you'll feel GRRRRRREAT!
7 days Jet lag	Afterglow of the experience will persist anywhere from few days to several weeks; what you've learned may change your life. Occasionally this learning will be negative and you'll be depressed for a while as you assimilate the fact that you've been wrong about something for all your life, but the depression is never extreme and - cheezy as it may sound - you will be a much better person afterwards.

Surgeon General's Warning: One of the aftereffects of psilocybin (and most all psychedelics for that matter) is "emotional fluctuation", i.e. things that would make you a bit happy cause euphoria and conversely things you don't like cause depression. At its worst this is a real manic-depressive rollercoaster, but usually the fluctuations are more positive than negative ("It's Monday morning and I feel GRRRRRRREAT!"). At any rate, this rarely lasts longer than a day or two, so don't worry about it.

Physical Interference -

In addition to the possible nausea in the beginning, which invariably wears off by the time the hallucinations start, the mushrooms can cause physical or psychosomatic interference. You will feel odd, weird and maybe scary physical sensations like liquid skin or distorted body-proportions. You may feel that you have trouble breathing; you may feel that you've just pissed or shit in your pants; you may feel that you're sinking into the ground or into yourself. If you really start worrying about this, you may start to feel like there are worms crawling inside your stomach, that the roof is about to collapse on you, that the sheet you are lying under is trying to eat you...

Don't panic! First of all, 'serious' effects of this type are quite unusual, but even if they do occur getting rid of them is usually easy. Just remember, nothing has really happened or is really happening, it's just your mind exaggerating and creating things. Learn to relax and distract your thoughts on other tangents at moments like this. A simple exercise you can try to practice thought diversion, no drugs needed:

Lie on your bed in complete darkness, listening to suitable evil/freaky music with headphones. Skinny Puppy and ambient industrial are the classic choices. Meditate or just relax for a while. Then, think about something you have a phobia about: snakes, spiders, skeletons, rats, tornados, earthquakes, even mushrooms. Everybody has something they're irrationally afraid of. Staring at a picture of such a thing beforehand may help. At any rate, you will, in all likelihood, feel yourself to be tipping over and falling uncontrollably. Imagine that you're falling into a bottomless pit filled with the nasty thing. Visualize it. Now attempt to wrench your thoughts to something else. If you can take half an hour of this without ripping off the headphones, you're in good shape.



Random Q & A

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Q:	Can black market 'shrooms be laced with LSD?
A:	Yes, very possibly, if the local market price for mushrooms is higher than that of LSD (as it usually is). If the mushroom looks nothing like any of the common psychoactive species, or you are told that one or two small ones are enough to trip hard, odds are it's laced. Note that at least one dealer, fooled by the urban legend of LSD needing strychnine for binding to the paper, laced his LSD-shrooms with strychnine as well! (PharmChem 1972, vol 1, #7) Thus, either get your shrooms fresh from the fields (cheaper as well) or know what they look like and what the dosage is before buying.
Q:	What about Amanita muscaria (Fly Agaric)?
A:	Amanita muscaria, the classic red toadstool with white warts on top, does not contain psilocybin, but a series of muscarinic deleriants. It's also poisonous (not very, but deaths are known) and in general rather nasty. Avoid. [This is not actually the case. Some Amanita species are poisonous, but the entheogenic ones are not. See the Pharmacotheon (Ott, 1993) for an extremely informed discussion of entheogenic Amanitas and the active principles they contain (ibotenic acid and muscimol). Ott shows that almost all "poisonings" have been accidental ingestions of entheogenic species thought to be edible (in the usual sense). Having never tripped before, people panic, assume they have been poisoned, go to the hospital, and "recover" (i.e. come down) -- J.F.]
Q:	What happens if I combine 'shrooms and other drugs?
A:	Alcohol: Variable, usually takes the edge off since it helps you relax. Note that if you're drunk before you eat the shrooms, the mental effects of your drunkenness will disappear as the trip starts. Large amounts will increase the nausea in the beginning. Cannabis: Nearly always the experience is intensified/lengthened, but a few people claim it actually ends the trip. Smoking is handy during the last few hours to extend the experience. MDMA/MDA: Known as an "MX-missile" (M as in mushrooms and X as in XTC), the experience is highly intensified and similar to LSD & MDMA ("candyflipping"). Nicotine: Smoking feels good. Nitrous: Catapulted into outer space for a few minutes. Other Psychedelics: Cross-tolerance usually present, not much point in taking other psychedelics at the same time.
Q:	Shrooms grow all by themselves in nature in zarking cow shit, why is sterility so important when growing them yourself?
A:	In nature, there are 17 billion spores of all kinds of different shrooms flying around. As people who've been to a cow pasture will know, most patties will not have Psilocybes, they'll either have something completely different or nothing at all. But in a pasture, there's a lot of shit, and there's a lot of shrooms, so it's enough if 1/100 patties have the right kind. Now, when you're growing them at home, if you sprinkle spores in each dish and don't give a shit about sterility, you'll have natural conditions and maybe every hundredth jar will get the right shrooms. Needless to say, this is not good, so you must push up the odds of the right shrooms growing by improving sterility. Resources: http://www.shroomery.org/index.php/par/3170#References