Bad Trip
What follows is an account of a bad experience with psychedelics, somewhat in the tradition of Erowid trip reports, though I don’t get too hung up on the details and the timings, which in any case defeated me very quickly anyway. It is unpleasant to read, though not as unpleasant as it was to experience. There is a slight Roko’s Basilisk aspect to these kind of bad trip stories — if you pay too much attention to them, you might even remember them on your next trip, and then it might happen to you too. Brains are highly suggestible, and doubly so when you’re tripping. If you haven’t tried psychedelics and would like to, I would suggest not reading this. I would hate to be the reason you didn’t try. If you have no interest in reading an account of a horrible thing without mitigation or moral lesson, I also wouldn’t read it. I’m not even sure why I’m writing it. Please consider yourself duly warned.
I drink the tea in the garden at the back of the hostel, so that the freezing air will help to cool it more quickly. The brew was made at home before leaving — thin strips of stem snipped into the top of the flask with a pair of scissors, a spoonful of sugar, a teabag, a squeeze of lemon. Psilocybe cubensis, the “White Albino” strain, an ugly, lumpen looking thing, a single mushroom taking up almost the entire bag. Maybe in recollection it seems uglier, more malignant. Not a clean white but a rotting one, the white of decay and blind eyes.
The stay at the hostel comes with a free entry to Whitby Abbey, so I pick up an audio guide and spend half an hour peering up at the ruins, pressing the little console to my ear and hearing about monks and phases of development. It is a bright, sharp kind of winter day. No rain, but enough residual dampness for a squelch in the grass, a slurry of yellowish mud between archways and the base of ramps where many feet have passed. Only by the end of the tour, as I hustle back through the gift shop, do I begin to feel the first ticklings. I use the toilet, fill up my water bottle, and then set off on my walk along the Cleveland Way, this section of which is a clifftop route between Whitby and Robin Hood’s bay.
I am anxious because two weekends previous, I had a bad trip. I’m not even sure I should be doing mushrooms today — I’m in Whitby on business, so to speak, intending to write a short story set here. But I’m also bullish — I remember the bad trip and I’m determined to prove to myself that it was just an accident of circumstance and of dose.
“Set and setting” is the jargon used by regular users of psychedelics. Set as in mindset — clear of anxiety, fears, stresses etc to as great a degree as possible. And setting — a place which is comfortable, safe, sensorily pleasing. The first bad trip happened in the village of Gradbach, near Buxton. The dose was unusually strong, stronger than I’d ever had before, and it gripped me as I struggled down a damp farm track, slithering in mud and run-off from the fields, standing water from recent rainfall, tractors crashing past and the smell of silage in the air. As I attempted to get away from the village and onto the track proper which would lead me up into the hills, I found myself only descending further into mud and filth as my vision shuddered and filled with clawing, moss-covered tree branches, sucking puddles.
By the time I broke out onto a hilltop my vision was spinning, my chest tight, everything collapsing around me. I found a private place, put my bag down, made myself sick, and then paced, hands on my head, gasping and blinking and trying to shake some sense back into myself, drag myself from the ugly, muddy thoughts which had infected me. A bad trip isn’t only the hallucinations, but the way they manifest both inside and out. You feel the ugliness which you see.
Some time later, after some time spent in an abandoned barn, I resolved to just keep walking. I had no wish to be found on a Saturday lunchtime by some hikers to explain that I’d taken too many mushrooms, and getting on a bus was inconceivable. And, gradually, with the help of 5live on the radio and the clean air at the top of the hill, I tracked across the heather and began to feel normal. The hills in the distance were beautiful again.
In Whitby I take care with my dose. I reason that I had been caught out by the powder in the bag the last time, having previously had a successful and happy trip with half of it. This time I take the pieces only from the stem, and in far less volume. And, as I step out along the clifftop path, I think to myself: ah, this is better isn’t it. No madness and no melting, just a delicate filigree of energy, rising from the earth and down from the clouds. I take photographs for the story I am writing, and make notes on my phone. I nod a good morning to passing hikers.
I don’t know why it all goes wrong so suddenly. Perhaps it seizes on some little shard of anxiety. Perhaps I feel it becoming muddy again, and the sun moves behind a cloud. But within moments, from one step to a stumble, I am plunged straight back into the same bad trip as before. Not just similar but identical. I am in a different place entirely, but everything abruptly begins to decay into the same rotting, muddy hues. The dead brown stalks of the grass become a pestilential yellow, the green grass losing all of its lustre and becoming dull and ugly. Things appear to be melting and rotting before my eyes. Everything is going down, being dragged to earth, dragged down into the muck. Even brighter colours — the pink of bushes or the blues of painted caravans — become fleshy, bruiselike, all of a piece with the rot and the sickness.
I attempt, momentarily, to wrest it back. This is a feature of psychedelics — you begin to think of the trip as an entity distinct from yourself, something you have to manage, engage with, guide, fight back against. I take a deep breath, I calm myself, I take a sip of water. I close my eyes and open them again for, for a miraculous moment, it works. The ugliness calms. The colours tentatively regain their vibrancy. And then I feel a sick, hot, feverishness in my chest, and my head spins, and I know I am in trouble.
How to describe the feeling? It is like I have been poisoned, because I have. A prickling, a feeling of invasion or parasitism, a viral heat. I once had Glandular Fever and felt, as my lymph nodes ballooned, like my spinal column was filled with contagion. It is this, more than anything, which I cannot ignore. The queasiness and the intrusion. I feel as if the stinking yellow mud is torrenting into me. Like I am wading across the fields of the Somme, surrounded by sludge and death and ordure, mustard gas hanging in the air, all plant life festering and obliterated.
I try several things. First I try to take myself away from the muddy track. I continue my walk, hoping that it will level out, but I reach a kissing gate and the other side is so churned up that I see a hiker coming the other way struggling to free her boot from it. Instead I begin the descent to the beach, hoping to find a flat rock to sit on and look at the sea, distracted by its steady motion, its coldness and calmness. But the track down to the beach is also sludgy, and there are no flat rocks to sit on, and the beach smells of rotting seaweed, and two dogs fight and bark as they strain at the end of their owners’ leads. Everything is cast in the same shades. There is no escape, nothing to look at, no new place to put myself in, because the problem is happening in my head, and now the mud is inside. The cliff face snarls into a rotting grimace. There is nowhere to go.
It’s about twenty minutes back to the hostel at the abbey. I don’t run, because running allows panic in, and this whole time I have been telling myself that I will not panic, that I will tell myself that I will be okay, that I will not turn a manageable situation into a medical one. I try to listen to something calming. A Terry Pratchett audiobook first, but the section I am up to has the narrator chewing out out an aggressive cockney accent, and the closeness of it in my ear repulses me. So I put on TalkSport to listen to the football, hoping to be lulled again by the rote comfort of sports commentary, but instead I listen to adverts, the first of which is for the Army, inviting me in a cold, blokey voice to join up and kill. What’s in it for you, mate? I wrench off my earphones and keep walking. I slip on a bank trying to overtake a couple, smearing mud up my side. I mumble something between an apology and a “no I’m fine” and keep walking.
As far as narrative goes, this is the end of the story. I make it back to my hostel bed, gasping, find my laptop, and find some youtube videos to watch so that I cannot think of anything else. For about 30 minutes this is agonising, impossible. I cannot pay attention and, though I refuse to look in my periphery, I feel the room melting and sickening around me. Slowly, slowly, the feeling passes. The panic recedes. And the trip becomes — again — beautiful. The colours of a red jacket bloom back into life. An electric shimmer covers the white walls. I have a sandwich and it is the best thing I had ever eaten. It is over.
This isn’t a cautionary tale in the usual sense. I don’t want anyone to read this and decide not to do psychedelics. But deciding not to do a potentially large dose, alone, in a muddy path in winter, two weeks after another shatteringly bad experience — that would be wise. Then again, I don’t know who would be so unwise as to do something like that in the first place. I had become complacent, cheerfully taking huge doses and then going for a walk in the hills. If there is one rule of psychedelics it is to always treat them with respect, no matter how many times you have done them and how secure you think you are. Your mind is a precious thing, and you should look after it.
*
I wrote the above section the day after the event, determined to get the experience down and extract something useful from it. Part of my fear as I did so was that by recording the events, I would reify them, fix them in my brain, make them easier to recall again. Does setting something down in print de-fang it, or sharpen it?
One thing I didn’t mention was that even on the way home, on the Coastliner bus which runs across the North York Moors from Whitby to York, I was experiencing something like flashbacks. Not true hallucinations, but everything I saw from the window, the heather and the woods and the fields, had the same ugly cast to it now, a lingering sense of doom and sickness and rot. I wondered whether I had ruined nature for myself entirely.
For some days and weeks after, this continued. I had several nightmares in which I was returned to the trip, and upon waking everything had the same texture still — the curtains in the spare room at my parents’ house where I stayed for Christmas were now an echo of the bruise-flesh pink that rose from the hills and undergrowth. I found that I could, if I wanted, as one might nudge a wobbly tooth to see if it still hurt, return to the feeling myself. I could look at a tree or a patch of scrub and, with a small cognitive push, feel it dissolve and sicken.
I was eventually forced to accept that what I was experiencing was trauma. Other associations remained. I had switched to a different brand of laundry detergent just before which had a stronger smell — now every time I dried clothes in my room, and the smell hung in the air, it took me back to the smell of my own clothes as I sweated through them and panicked. The mushrooms which I was growing on my boiler were constantly lurking evidence of the sickness — and they were real too! A clot of white mycelium and mulch in a wet plastic bag. I had to burp it to prevent CO2 build-up. Were spores settling on my skin and in my walls?
Over time it faded. I got rid of the mushrooms once it became clear how much they were weighing on me. I did once decide to have some 2C-B instead, with the same stubbornness as before — I will beat this, I will face up to it, I won’t be stuck with the trauma forever — but though it is a completely different drug, as I felt my vision shift and wobble I began to panic once more. I was at a gig and I considered going and making myself sick and going home. I wasn’t experiencing the same bad trip this time, but my body thought I was. I suppose I might have been approaching a panic attack. I’ve not had one before. I paced, I sipped water, I decided that rather than go out into the night I would let the music wash me clear instead and relax me. It worked. I immersed myself into the gig and I calmed down. I suspect this was helped by the fact the 2C-B was a bit of a dud. I barely had any visual effects at all in the end.
That’s the end of testing myself on psychedelics for a while I think.
Above, I wrote: I don’t want anyone to read this and decide not to do psychedelics. I don’t know what I feel about that any more. Only a few months ago I wrote another article all about why I loved mushrooms so much. There’s a certain irony to having such a bad time almost immediately after that. Now I realise I have become the horror story. The experienced user, complacent and casual, ambushed by a bad time. The person that anti-drug campaigners say you’ll turn into, jerking awake from nightmares in which you experience the same trauma over and over again.
I don’t think I’m going to quit, but I’m going to give it at least a year or two and only choose the safest possible place and a low, threshold dose. They’re on a final warning. Many sensible people would probably consider what has already passed to be enough justification to never go near them again, but I’ve had too many good experiences to accept that. I suppose we’ll see how stupid that turns out to be. Trauma sticks to the bones, after all, and memory is tenacious.
Stay safe!
