Trying out a new strain

Throughout 2024, I am planning on doing one psychedelic trip a month. Psychedelics have been shown to repair connections within the brain and help treat PTSD and other symptoms. I have done a few different trips this year and you can read about some of them here:

My 5 Gram Mushroom Trip Was Insane
2.3 gram trip report

For this trip, I tried a few new things. The first new thing I tried was a new strain of magic mushroom. My trips this year have mainly been from psychedelic infused chocolate bars. I got a few different strains of magic mushrooms this past month and I wanted try out actual fruiting body and see how those effects were.

For this trip, I went with the B+ strain. B+ is a beginner strain with very mild effects and I thought it would be the perfect strain to try making tea with. The purpose of making a tea out of the mushrooms is because it is supposed to offer a smoother ride. The come up is the worst part of a mushroom trip and making a tea is supposed to help with that. It reduces the amount of nausea, anxiety and other hard feelings that people have during the come up.

Making the tea is pretty simple. All you have to do is chop the desired amount of mushrooms and add them to some boiling water and then you let it steep for at least 20 minutes. This will pull all of the desired chemical out of the mushroom body and infuse the water with it. Then you can sift out the mushroom chunks because the actual fruiting body is what makes you nauseas because your body has a hard time digesting and processing it.

After the mushrooms have steeped in the water for 20 minutes, I removed all the chunks and then added some cacao and some honey to give the tea some better flavoring. Cacao and honey are supposed to help your body absorb the chemicals as well and help guide you into the beginning of the trip.

After about 30 minutes from drinking the tea, I started to feel the effects slowly start creeping in. They were pretty subtle which was nice. By this point, I had come to the conclusion that the tea method is sort of like cheating the come up and I will be using that method from now on. My anxiety associated with the beginning of a mushroom trip was almost non existent and I don't know if that was because I am getting used to it or if the tea really helps with the come up like they say it does.

As the effects started to appear, I just laid on my bed listening to an album by The Desert Dwellers. Their music is pretty interesting and is something sort of similar to tribal trap music. There really aren't any words and it is more supposed to make you think and feel different emotions, which is perfect for mushroom trips. I think I listened to them for about an hour before I decided I was done hiding in my room.

One thing I noticed is that this trip was extremely mild and there were almost no visuals. I was hoping for some cool fractal patterns, but I did notice that the world was breathing if I stopped and just looked at stuff. Colors were also a bit more vibrant, but other than that, there really weren't any crazy visuals like my previous trips. I was definitely feeling the effects though. The B+ strain is more of an introspective strain and I felt myself getting lost in my own thoughts every now and then, so I think at higher doses, this could be a great strain to really dive deep into your own consciousness.

The weather was nice, so my wife and I decided to head out on a walk. One really cool part of the walk was when I went into my garage and pushed the button to open my garage door. The garage was cold and dark, but as the door slid open, warm sunshine began to pour in and I could see the colors of the outside world. I remember thinking how cool that was that the cold darkness was overtaken by the warmth and light and I was presented with a colorful world. That is one thing I love about mushrooms is how they allow you to view the world and you feel so much more connected to it.

As we started our walk, I was just looking up at the trees and the sky. It was so warm and it felt so good. As we were walking, it was like my brain was going back to when I was a child and I started having so many memories of when I was little. I started to think about when my first memories began and I think they started sometime around the age of 3. I had strong memories of camping and being out in the woods playing with pine cones and sticks. I could remember the smell of the pine trees. It was pretty cool.

Later on during the walk, we saw a Chinook helicopter flying up in the sky and I was transported back to Iraq. I was flying on a Chinook from one base to another and we started taking fire from underneath. As the bullets started coming up through the helicopter, I remembered how scared I was and I just started crying as we were walking. We decided to sit down so I could work through this moment.

I had just gotten back to Iraq from visiting my family and I was about 7 months into my first year there in the war. I didn't have any of my gear as I sat there with bullets flying into the helicopter and I remember feeling like this was my time to go. I remember thinking that I had just seen my wife and our son and I was going to die and never see them again. Luckily we made it back to our base without any further attacks. I had never really opened up to my wife about this incident or the details around it, but during this trip, I was able to.

We sat in the grass for a while and just talked more about life and I just watched the clouds go by. It was really nice to just take some time and sit and watch the world go by. The rest of the day was great and we just spent it together.

Yesterday's trip didn't offer any significant insight or anything and I didn't have crazy visuals, but it is still cool to experiment with different strains and doses so that I can get more comfortable with these trips. Mushrooms are an amazing medicine and I am really looking forward to continuing these monthly trips. My memory is improving and I can remember a lot more stuff that I had subconsciously blocked out of my memory. I am also dreaming more throughout the night and getting better sleep.

Thanks for taking the time to read through these trip reports. Psychedelics have the potential to change so many lives. It is nice that the perception that people have for these substances is changing and they are beginning to see the life changing potential that they have for people.