‘Feeling very calm and relaxed in the home of a friend, a little anxious as always before a psychedelic session. It’s the first time I have visited them, so everything is new, but I am generally in a very good and positive head-space. Dinner is eaten and wine is drunk, and the atmosphere is very good. People present. There is me and my friend A (who I have met a few times only but have had a fairly long online relationship with), and his partner B, who I have met for the first time today. A has been an extremely experienced psychonaut for decades, and I trust him greatly. Another couple, C and D, who are known to all present, appear later on at the peak of the trip, but purely on the astral level. Setting: a Friday night in early October, 2015. A detached bungalow in the deep British countryside. The lounge where most of the session takes place is decorated with many ‘niknaks’ from around the world: spiritual statues of Buddha, Pan, fauns and satyrs, decorated skulls, brass animals and pixie horse brasses, original and reproduction paintings (some very surreal). The place has an extremely Celtic or Pagan vibe. The lighting is very low and almost entirely made up of candles placed around the room. Nag Champa incense burns. During the come up the music is mostly the Stone Roses and Black Grape, good vibes and good grooves! As the drug really begins to take effect, a series of ‘mash up’ CDs is put on (lots of different parts of many well-known dance music and electronic tracks mixed cleverly together). As the intensity increases I ask for something a bit less full-on and more mellow, and from then on it’s mostly Psych Folk and Psychedelic Rock that is played, with stand-out tracks and albums from Traffic, The Incredible String Band, Van Morrison, Dr. Strangely Strange, Kevin Ayers and David Crosby. Intention: I have wanted to try another high dose ‘breakthrough’ MDMA session for many years, but the substance has just not been available to me. I’ve also wanted to be able to take psychedelics with an experienced person, not so much to ‘guide’ me, as just to be there when I trip so that I can fully let go into the experience. For the last fifteen years or so I have mostly taken psychedelics alone, in bed, in darkness, with headphones on. I feel like I have exhausted that setting, and want to try something new. I have also been sticking to fairly low doses for the most part. I wanted to feel safe enough to be able to take a higher dose. As far as self-analysis or spiritual seeking went, I had nothing in particular that I wanted to unearth or work on. Dose. Dinner had been consumed approximately thirty minutes before taking the first capsule. One gel cap containing around two hundred and fifty mgs of MDMA and a hundred mcgs of 1P-LSD was swallowed with wine. About two hours later when it had been established that I was OK with this, another ‘booster dose’ gel cap of around two hundred and fifty mgs of MDMA and two hundred mcgs of 1P-LSD was taken. Coming up: For the first couple of hours it felt mostly like an MDMA come up, but not too strong. It was slightly trippy, and I was enjoying the company and the music a lot. The MDMA came on first, making me feel warm, secure, happy and relaxed (it’s hard to have a hard time on MDMA!), which set the tone for the 1P as it came on. It’s a wonderfully clever way to avoid the paranoia that sometimes accompanies an acid or 1P trip, I think. Black Grape was very funky, and the conversation flowed freely and easily. Next the mash-up CDs came on and they were also a lot of fun, especially spotting all the dance tunes that I hadn’t heard for years. I had a bit of a walk and dance about the room, the laser light show projection was a lot of fun. At some point around two hours after dropping, we dropped another capsule. I felt very secure and not really ‘out of it’ in any way. Fully in control and very much enjoying the experience. Main experience. After this, things started to get a little strange. I can’t put my finger on exactly when it happened, but the experience started to gain in intensity, and I had to sit down and just watch things unfold. Around this time, A told me later, I started to go quite quiet and became much less communicative. I think A could see I was having an intense time and asked me if I’d like the music changed. I said yes, I wanted something a bit more mellow. The ‘mash up’ music was very frenetic, and it had begun to sound almost demonic in some way. It was like I could hear the voice of a ‘nature demon’ in the music (and especially the vocals) in places, and that the energy level was being raised to a very high state. It was like Mendes, Pan, or Baphomet, a very powerful nature spirit, was immanentizing right there and then, through the music, and into the room. It wasn’t so much scary, (throughout the whole trip there was a very Pan like presence, but it was nature’s Pan, fun, frolicking, mischievous, musical Pan, that was guiding me on the journey) as just very, very real, visceral and intense. I started to wonder if A was a Pagan and imagined that perhaps he was the head of some mystical, ancient, Celtic, Pagan, hereditary witch cult, that was involved in ancestor and animal worship. Perhaps he was the embodiment of the Pan like figure. At least that’s how it seemed to me. Whilst this could be seen to be a paranoid delusion, it didn’t feel like one, and as I say in general it didn’t feel scary, although I believed it to be ‘true’ at the time. It was when the music changed from the mash-ups to the Psych Folk that things really began to shift though. The music married perfectly with the very magickal, Pagan trip that had now begun to unfurl. It was at about this time that I became completely drawn to and absorbed by a ram or sheep’s skull that hung on the wall over the fireplace. I was told later that it was a Tibetan Bon Po fetish used by shamans but didn’t know this at the time. The skull had four horns and was covered by metal plates which had been affixed to it, showing teeth and jewelled eyes etc., some of its real teeth were also showing at the front. In the candlelight and the reflections of the other brass objects nearby, and in my mind state, looking at it from a few meters away, it looked to be made of something like shimmering, liquid, rose gold. At one point the words in the music started to appear from the ram’s mouth, and it began to communicate with me via the music. It came alive. It was a momentous occasion, and I felt very privileged to be witnessing it. I was whisked away from my everyday reality into an ancient Celtic village where families would gather around their ‘hearth shrine’ altars, to worship their ancestors which would then impart important knowledge of their tribe’s rituals, history and traditions. I realised I was standing holding hands with other people (my ‘Fey’ family?), and we were all witnessing the great event together. It felt like I had been transported to the world of Faery. Things got a little scary as the Ram entity kept speaking, manifesting its essence, and slowly, the rest of its body began to emerge out of the wall. Its skeleton was dressed in rags in places. I could now not only see its head, but the rest of its skeleton too, and it felt like it was mostly a feminine entity, like a very old, wise and slightly scary lady, although it had masculine aspects too, and so I’d have to say it was hermaphroditic. From here on I was completely torn away from normal reality, for what I guess was about three hours. It’s extremely difficult to piece together what I actually perceived, and in which order. A would occasionally ‘check in’ on me, and it would suddenly be a huge physical and mental shock to realise that I actually had a real body in a real world, and that it wasn’t all just some kind of an extremely bizarre vision or dream. I remember mentally and physically starting, when A would ask if I was OK. I think it’s probably the highest I have ever been, apart from the time I smoked NN-DMT many years previously, but the short acting DMT flash was nothing compared to the prolonged intensity of this. Here are a few of the other visions that I had, but it’s very difficult to remember them clearly or put them in any specific order. There was a part where I was aware of a couple of acquaintances, who I know to be very experienced magick workers. In the vision they embodied part human and part animal spirit bodies. They weren’t like Satyrs or Fauns, with animal parts and human body parts joined together, but more like a perfect genetic amalgamation of the two species. It seemed they were cat or rabbit or fox like in some way, with definite mammalian characteristics. They were guiding children around this strange village festival. They were friendly entities, like sprites, that were caring for and looking after everyone. C was relaxed and friendly, laughing and joking with the children. D was flitting around like a mad thing (flying like a fairy), also happy and laughing, and together they both appeared to be weaving a good and positive reality for everyone else, to make things flow more smoothly. I could even see the weave as a series of horizontal red and green bars at times (like the Welsh flag?)
§655
Flintshire, Wales
2010s
Male: Age 41-50
occasional supernatural experiences
inside a private house
12 am-3 am
many hours
with several other people, none of whom shared my experience
you had taken alcohol or a medicine or drug
aloof
loss of sense of time, unusually vivid memories of the experience, a sense that the experience marked a turning point in your life, a sudden warmth before the experience