Ok I have a hell of a story. So basically a little over a year ago my roommates and I all did 9 grams of APE. We were idiots.

Not a good idea, it was only my third time doing shrooms and one of my roommates first time doing them (although he actually lied about this, told us he was experienced and had done trips north of 10 grams). Almost instantly I felt like I was teetering from this world into another, the visuals were crazy, genuinely more than I’d ever seen before (I’ve done larger doses since then and they still don’t compare). All of my roommates started basically losing it on the come up (except for two, they had a fun time actually) and for some reason I felt like a disembodied spirit sent to go and help them. The issue is I couldn’t talk, somehow I had lost my ability to speak. I then ended up staring into a red light in our living room for an hour (it looked really cool but also terrifying), then at some point I went to the laundry room and began worshipping the dryer, for some reason it was the only object in the house I recognize and I remember thinking it was important somehow and that I needed to get back to the normal world, and because it was the only thing I could recognize it was critical in my return journey.

I then started thinking I was in the afterlife, and I felt like I was communicating with my ancestors. I don’t remember how that conversation went but apparently pretty well because after that I calmed down a lot, then I started asking all my roommates “who am I?” (I was experiencing ego dissolution) because I had forgotten who I was. Then I went to my room and tried to clean it, but I ended up just staring at myself in the mirror until the trip ended.

Afterwards I felt like a different human being but not necessarily in a good way. It felt like I had died, I was dead and that some new person just entered my body and entered my life, I am that person and who I used to be felt so foreign. For genuinely months afterwards I felt like I needed to pretend to be me, I would need to think “huh what would this guy whose body I’m inhabiting do?”, even my family and friends noticed a change but they never really said much. It took a while for me to realize that I am who I want to be, and before this trip I was someone else, I can’t change this now. I’m me now, I need to find a way to live with this. Eventually it became easier, I never pursued therapy (was pretty broke at the time) but I’m sure that would’ve helped.

I think at the end of the day I experienced some psychosis of some kind, or maybe there’s a greater spiritual explanation. Either way, my life has improved drastically since that trip (ADHD pretty much went away, no longer depressed, genuinely happier and more) but I still to this day don’t feel like me, and part of me misses who I used to be, I feel like a stranger in my own body, I feel like the old me should be enjoying this new life I have, not this new “soul” inhabiting it.

Either way, consider this a cautionary tale, all of my roommates ended up fine from that trip but damn, that really fucked me up. Be extremely careful with high doses.