The gold seemed to glisten on the mushroom, giving it an air of royalty and importance. It was almost as if some care free dealer had taken the time to paint the little bundles of poison that colour to make them seem expensive. A sharp contrast to the magnificent gold, the blue that adorned the stems of the mushrooms set off clear alarms in my head. The blue blotches against the yellowish white mushroom stalks seemed to be that way almost as a warning to all creatures not to ingest this mushroom. The blue blobs looked dangerous. They looked a perfect colour to signify what they are. Poison.
My recently proposed to fiancé looked in anticipation as my friend Shane and I palmed the dried “Magic Mushrooms” and stuffed them into our mouths. The taste was appalling. It tasted as though we had thought ourselves to be beasts of the earth and sat down to feast on nature itself. We chewed the poisonous but surprisingly easy to access mushrooms and swallowed the paste that now resided in our mouths. Now, we wait for the “magic” to happen.
I sat on a beach chair in the sun, hand in hand with my fiancé as we chatted while I waited for the Mushroom Trip to start. Just as I began to express my disappointment in the quality of the illicit drugs I had purchased and ingested, a sudden wave passed over me.
I was flooded with almost animal like senses. The sun seemed to shine brighter than it ever had. The wind blew and i could feel every ripple of wind as my clothes seemed to tremor. The most pronounced sensation was my visuals. Everything was brilliantly sharper in resolution. It was almost as if my mind had set my eyes to a lower quality setting all my life and I was finally seeing the world in all its glory. As incredible as the visuals were, there was a slightly ghastly side to them as when i looked at her or Shane’s face – they seemed to melt and distort to make an uncomfortable swirl of face. To say it was unnerving would be an understatement. But nonetheless it was extremely interesting.
Shane and I laughed and stumbled about like idiots having ingested the Psilocybin Mushrooms, having the time of our lives. My loving fiancé watched over us, making sure neither of us did anything silly in our drug induced states.
I stumbled over to the refrigerator and opened it. The cool air from the refrigerator seemed to seep into my very bones, and I stood there for a moment, just taking in the experience. I grabbed a bottle of water and drank the contents as if my life depended on it.
After an hour or so, nature called and I hobbled towards the bathroom. The pictures that lined the halls had come alive and they swirled and twisted as if to amuse me. After what seemed like a lifetime, I finally entered the bathroom and made my way to the toilet. I relieved myself amidst a series of events my mind had produced such as the bath rocking back and forth and the toilet growing and shrinking as I tried to aim carefully into it. What an odd experience. I went to wash my hands, and as I did so, i caught a glimpse of Him.
People had always warned me against staring into a mirror while on psychedelics, but this didn’t seem bad at all.
I finished washing my hands and proceeded to stare into the mirror – for some reason the sight of myself in that state drew me in more and I could not bring myself to look away. The longer I stared, the more I began to realize where those concerned warnings came from. My identical image seemed to have morphed and changed.
As I looked into the mirror, the person that stared back at me morphed and distorted in the most grotesque way. His/Its features began to darken and the most evil smile appeared on his face. I was looking at my reflection but I have never felt fear like that in my life. This THING in the mirror wanted to hurt me. But how when the Thing is me?
I did not move much, simply frozen in fear by the dark horrible version of myself staring at me. No words were exchanged but I could sense and feel the evil and malice in this creature. The bright white light in the bathroom did nothing to stop this ghoul I saw standing before me. A knock on the door brought me back to reality and as I excited the bathroom, I could swear I saw the Thing in the mirror give me a sick grin.
I told everyone what happened and they all laughed it off as me just “tripping”. But I knew what I had seen and it was haunting me. There was a sense of primal fear that something unknown was going to kill me.
As the Psilocybin began to wear off and I was more conscious, I googled what had happened to me. I suffer from sleep paralysis and when I read up on it, it was comforting to know I wasn’t alone.
So I began to probe deeper and deeper into what I could have seen in my drug induced state. All articles led me to the same conclusion.
I had seen my “Shadow Self”.
As described by scholars and enthusiastic psychedelic users, the “Shadow Self” is merely our repressed bad feelings about ourselves. What we see is a physical manifestation of what we as individuals perceive to be the worst parts of ourselves. The hatred, anger, depression. All the negative feelings we suppress seem to come to light and manifest in that way when you have done Magic Mushrooms (with the theory summarizing that the Psilocybin in the mushrooms allows you to access parts of your brain you don’t usually do).
It is brilliantly clear to me as to why our conscious mind would suppress such a horrific thing. From the bottom of my heart, I can say with complete certainty that seeing the horrific figure that is me standing and looking at me, would haunt and stay with me forever. The article did state, however, that the only real way to become “one” with that separated and estranged hidden part of you, is to engage and understand it.
With this new found knowledge, I went back to my bedroom while my fiancé napped on the couch and Shane lay in the grass “being one with nature”.
I walked across the shaggy carpet on my bedroom floor and it felt as though God himself had made the carpet. I seemed to glide effortlessly on the carpet and did not have to take any physical steps.
I reached my bedside at last and opened my hidden stash of illicit goodies.
There were 2 grams of these mind opening mushrooms left. I HAD to make peace with my Shadow Self. The 2 mushrooms were chewed and swallowed before I had time to second guess myself.
I sat in my darkened room waiting for the second dose of the Mushrooms to kick in. Even just sitting on my bed, feet dragging back and forth over the Carpet of God – I felt absolute bliss. But at the back of my mind, the other ME was still terrorizing me.
I finally started to feel the poison enter my blood stream and I knew it was time. I went to the bathroom in my bedroom, away from the others in the house. I tentatively walked into the bathroom, all the while avoiding the mirror. I positioned myself, took a few deep breaths and looked straight up and into the mirror. Nothing.
Just as I was about to release a sigh of relief, I could see the features of my reflection darkening. I could sense the hostility and malice and fear crept rapidly into my heart. Within seconds, He was there. Taking advice from the strangers on the internet, I began to speak to myself/Him.
“We are a team. I mean no harm for either of us. We are one. We are the same person” I told him. His lips moved in tandem with mine, as you would expect a reflection to. I finished the sentence and waited to see if my mirror mans demeanor would change. How wrong I was.
Completely opposite to my expression, a cruel smile spread across his face as I saw His/my arms reach out from the mirror and pull me in. It felt like a dream. I couldn’t feel my body. I couldn’t speak. I could just see myself in the reflection.
“Let’s go and see our beautiful wife to be, shall we?” I heard my voice say.
As He turned away from the mirror, my vision went completely black until I felt myself tether to him. It was as if we were joined by an elastic band. I went from being trapped in the mirror to be slingshot back into my body. Except something felt wrong. I was in my body but i was watching everything unfold from behind my eyes. The Man in the Mirror was controlling my actions. It felt like I was a passenger in a car and all I could do was watch.
………………………………………….…………………….
We laid eyes on my beautiful fiancé as she lay sleeping.
I watched my body walk over to her and He/We stood watching her sleep. What was he going to do? I was beside myself. I tried to scream but as a spectator in your body, your screams mean nothing.
My Shadow Self sat down besides my sleeping bride and played with her hair. Maybe this is some misunderstanding. The Shadow Self clearly just wants to coexist – I thought.
He could obviously hear my thoughts and hopes because as soon as I had that thought, He let out the most maniacal laugh I had ever heard. It resonated pure evil.
Almost as if to prove JUST how evil, I watched from behind my eyes as my hand reached into the table besides the couch and took a hunting knife I kept for protection out. I watched my self stab my fiancé so many times I lost count. He didn’t seem capable of stopping and I just sat – like a dummy – behind my eyes. By the time he was done, the couch was just a complete mess. He had at many times stabbed right through her and into the foam. There was blood and bits of her flesh everywhere. He also made sure he left her with a smile on her face and carved her throat open from ear to ear. “To make her smile one last time” he told me.
I felt my body stand up and walk towards the door. He stopped to glance in the mirror and I saw the evil diabolical smile on his face.
“Let’s go and find Shane now”, he said.
“Then you can take control again. I just needed a bit of fun.”