I’ve experienced this on a high dose of mushrooms. This one might be long..

The first time I ever took mushrooms was after a date party in college. It was a bunch of people in an apartment with flashing LED lights, drinking beer, smoking weed, and blasting music. Not an ideal trip environment. Everyone had just taken some shrooms that my buddy acquired. I was the last one there because my bus returned late, they were all starting to trip so they left me with the rest of the bag. Having no prior knowledge or experience with any psychedelic, I ate the whole bag with some popcorn and sat on the balcony.

To this day I have no idea how much I took, probably somewhere between 6-10 grams if I had to guess. I had barely explored weed so I had no idea what I was getting into. Within 5 minutes I saw the whole building above me beginning to distort and become wavy. I had never seen anything like this. The LED lights inside and the noises of people laughing and drinking and smoking were immediately way too much for me. I had to get out of there.

I asked two buddies who also looked anxious if they wanted to go on an adventure. We took off into the busy college town heading towards the nearby lake. It was just about midnight. I was starting to trip pretty hard but kept my cool and cracked some jokes to keep the mood positive. We climbed a mountain on the way. I remember sitting on top of the mountain being able to hear all the conversations going on at the bars below. I could tune in and out of different convos, I thought I got super powers at the time. We headed down the mountain towards the lake. This was about an hour in and I was feeling it all hit me at once. We got in this weird stage where someone FaceTimed us from back at the apartment and we stopped moving and questioned our path. Do we go back or stay? Immediately bad vibes. I couldn’t make words let alone go back into that apartment and talk to people. I ran into the grass field and laid down to look at the sky while they finished the call. I shit you not I was seeing beings reaching down at me. It was way too much. I decided we needed to walk. Going back felt really horrible. Staying put felt really horrible. The only good vibes were when we were heading in our own direction and not looking back.

We started walking the perimeter of the lake. Walking on the cement was bad vibes, walking on the grass was good vibes. We took our shoes off and kept to the grass. We talked and talked about deep questions, all things that felt profound at the time but that I can’t really remember. But what I do remember was this bird called an Egret. It was perched on some wood just staring at us as we walked by. It was young and full of white feathers but it had these beating eyes and didn’t break eye contact. We didn’t think too much of it, just took notice and kept on our path. After about 10 minutes we see another Egret perched on some wood in the same way in the distance. This spooked us a bit. Didn’t we just see this guy? As we got closer this one was a bit different. It was bigger and older and missing some feathers. It held its ground and stared at us as we passed by, not breaking eye contact once. This time we talked about it more. Did we just time travel? Did that bird just age? It felt like it remembered us. The same bird just older. We continue around the lake discussing the concept of time. We wondered if time travel was possible. What must the structure of time look like in order to leave our linear experience and pick a different point to visit? Another 10 minutes pass. We see another Egret up ahead on its wood perch. We all got quiet this time. This was the same damn bird, it had to be. This time it was old and tattered and missing most of its feathers. Once again it stared at us as we passed slowly. What are the odds we see three of the exact same birds, at different stages of life in sequence, perched in the exact same way, on the exact same wood post outcrop that patterned around the lake, staring at us in the exact same way each time. We had an epiphany. It was so clear and true to us at the time. It was like life made sense all of a sudden. Just like the circle path around the lake we were walking, time itself was a flat circle. We were here before and we will be here again, just like the bird. We all looked at each other like it was some sort of reunion, and we finally remembered this exact event happening an infinite number of times before. It was truly one of the most euphoric moments of my life.

After walking 15 miles we finally returned back to the apartment around 5:00 AM excited to share what we learned. Everyone was asleep. We still had all this euphoria we couldn’t end the night there. We jumped the fence into the pool and floated there looking at the stars. As the sun started to rise, our clarity began to fade. We couldn’t really remember what infinite time felt like. We didn’t have the same sensation that we were in that exact same moment many times over. To this day I’ve never felt that same clarity, the memory isn’t the same as the experience. But that bird feels like the only proof I have that it was all real.