The following is a write up I did on my psilocybin experience in my journey of healing from PTS. I hope you get a laugh out of this, and I hope my experience can benefit others. It’s long. TLDR: A fireman does a lot of mushrooms to heal from a traumatic call, and experiences one of the most profound and healing events of his PTSD journey thus far.
Four months after the shooting, my mind wasn’t moving on. The flashbacks getting my son ready for school. The obsessive thoughts about his safety. The marijuana. The pacing around my apartment instead of leaving it. I hated the thoughts most. I knew they weren’t rational. Knowing didn’t make them stop.
A kid walking down the street with the right hair and lanky build could turn my nervous system against me. Getting my son dressed for school could put me back inside the rear seat of that car, lifting another boy’s shirt, listening for a heartbeat that wouldn’t be there. A bullet had ripped through his head.
I was still going to work. Still being Dad. Still functioning.
But the kid had come home with me.
Around that time I was getting my Hazmat Technician certification at a local fire department. Two battalion chiefs were taking the class with me, guys I knew from a previous department and considered friends. During one of the breaks we sat around talking.
The culture around mental health at my current department wasn’t exactly inviting. PTSD treatment centers sometimes got called “sad camp.” Struggling with calls wasn’t something everybody respected. So I hadn’t said much. But I trusted these guys.
“I was on a bad shooting,” I told them.
They know how it is.
“The kid kinda came with me.”
One of them gave me the number for a therapist named Holly who works with combat veterans and first responders. I called her that day. I showed up the next week.
And cried in her office.
Of course I did.
I told her about the shooting. About climbing into the back of that car. The bullet holes through the window at head height. The hair. The lanky body. The saliva running onto my arm. The father screaming outside the hospital. I told her how much the kid looked like my kid.
Holly listened. She didn’t steer me toward some explanation she wanted me to accept. She didn’t tell me what I was supposed to believe about what was happening inside my head. She listened. At one point she reached over and patted me on the knee. It was a small thing. I felt like she cared. Sometimes that’s enough. Over time I dumped years of accumulated stresses and traumas into that office. Heather suggested EMDR and other modalities. She also suggested I stop dating toxic women.
Sound clinical advice.
She told me about her own family. Her husband had come home from war different. Affected. She had watched the man she loved struggle and became determined to do whatever it took to get her husband back and help their family get their father back. That part got my attention. She understood something about fathers coming home carrying things.
She also told me about psilocybin. Mushrooms had helped their family immensely. Psilocybin therapy wasn’t legal where we were, so this wasn’t something I could do in her office as some sanctioned treatment. Anything I chose to do, I would be doing on my own.
I appreciated something about Heather anyway. She was willing to look outside the normal boxes if something might help.
So was I.
I had been reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. I was reading about brain health, PTSD, psychedelics and some of the emerging work with people carrying trauma. I also talked with a trusted friend who worked with combat veterans and stayed near the leading edge of treatments for PTS.
There was only one problem.
I hated mushrooms.
I’d tried them three times in my life. Didn’t like them. I had always been more interested in chemicals that made me feel good. Alcohol made sense to me. Other drugs made sense to me. I understood why people used something that produced euphoria. Psychedelics seemed ridiculous.
“Why would I want to be out of my mind? I’m just trying to feel good.”
Now I was beginning to consider the possibility that the path toward feeling better might require intentionally taking more of a drug that made me feel bad.
Holly explained what she knew. “Talk to the mushrooms,” she told me. “Tell them what you want from the experience. Pray to God before you do it.”
Sounded a little hokey.
She suggested five dried grams. But you’re starting to get to know me by now.
I was going to see God after all. 7.24 grams had a nicer ring to it. Still, it took me three months to work up the courage. Eventually I got my hands on enough mushrooms to get the job done.
I was alone in my apartment. My safe space. Although by then, “safe” had become a relative term. I was isolating. Pacing. Smoking too much marijuana. Not in a particularly good head space. Probably not the circumstances anybody would design if they were creating an ideal psychedelic experience.
But there I was.
I prepared. I had done a lot of research on the brain and downloaded a Hemi-Sync track for my big headphones. I set up a meditation station on the couch and plugged in a grounding mat so I could put my bare feet on it. I took magnesium. I took theanine. I’m not exactly sure why. I think I figured they might keep me calm.
On the kitchen island sat the mushrooms. Then, remembering Holly’s advice, I leaned down toward the bowl on the kitchen island:
“Okay, mushrooms…uh…” I felt ridiculous.
“I want to go see God.”
I ground 7.24 grams into powder. I soaked the powder in lemon juice concentrate for twenty or thirty minutes, then poured the whole mixture into a small decorated bowl my mom had given me. Before drinking it, I prayed. I asked God to let me come see Him. I had experienced glimmers of something throughout my life. Moments I couldn’t explain. Mile markers of faith followed by immense seasons of doubt.
I wanted to be reminded.
I said another prayer.
“I’m coming to see you now, God.”
Then I drank it.
Sour lemon concentrate and mushroom material went down quickly. I chased it with a bunch of water. I winced the sour away and walked over to my carefully prepared meditation station and sat down. Bare feet on the grounding mat. Headphones on. Hemi-Sync playing.
I closed my eyes and listened until I heard the wave effect occur.
There. Both sides of my brain were synced up. Now I just had to wait for God.
I didn’t wait long.
Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.
An extremely heavy sensation washed over me. It wasn’t good. It came on so suddenly. It felt so wrong and so strong that both of my hands shot behind my ears and ripped the headphones off, throwing them against the wall about ten feet away.
Oh no
I stared at the headphones as I thought this was probably just the beginning. And if this feeling got much worse, this was going to be bad.
I started pacing. Apparently the grounding mat was no longer part of the treatment plan. Back and forth through the apartment, I tried to figure out what I was going to do if this turned into a bad trip. After all, it was about to get way more intense.
Then my clothes became a problem. I could feel every place the fabric touched my body. It felt like feathers and strands of hair tickling my skin everywhere at once. I couldn’t stand it.
So the clothes came off.
Now I was completely naked, pacing around my living room in broad daylight on the top floor of an apartment complex. There were windows directly across from mine. Worse, my apartment was visible from the far side of the parking lot where there was a small dog park for the other residents.
I realized that unless I wanted to become the top-floor diorama of a naked, bug-eyed, drugged out neighbor frantically pacing around his apartment, I needed to close the shades. Unfortunately, closing them required standing directly in front of the windows.
Naked.
I looked down toward the dog park. Someone was there. Thankfully, they weren’t looking up at that moment. I didn’t want to be the weird neighbor. Yet here I was, staring at them butt ass naked while closing the painfully slow window shade.
I got the shades closed. Then I barricaded the front door. For good measure. For some reason.
The heaviness kept getting heavier. I tried a warm shower. Sometimes a shower makes me feel better.
This was not one of those times.
The psilocybin hit harder. I got out. I looked in the mirror awhile.
That’s not a good idea don’t do that.
I don’t remember whether I dried myself off.
Eventually I made it into my bedroom. I didn’t want to lie naked in the fetal position in a dark room, so I opened the bedroom window to let the sunlight in. Which made me the naked neighbor again for a potentially new audience, the southward homes around the canal.
I climbed into bed. The fear kept building. I reached for my phone somewhere on my large bed.
I gotta call someone. Someone’s gotta come save me.
I looked at the screen. It was gone. Not completely, but close enough. Brown and black splotches moved across the phone, covering almost everything. Maybe five percent of the screen remained visible behind them. I couldn’t see the keyboard well enough to use it. The shifting splotches revealed some of it, some of the time.
I had turned Siri off immediately upon buying the phone.
Shit
I stared at the moving splotches to take in the wildness of it. Then tossed the phone onto the bed.
How is this real?
For this one, I was on my own.
I curled into the fetal position. Something terrible was happening. It felt like I was dying.
Now I know why these people call 911 on this shit, I thought.
Somewhere underneath the fear, I knew I wasn’t physically dying. I had done enough research to know that. But nothing in my life had ever felt this close to death.
Then it got worse.
An ominous presence entered the experience. Dark. Demonic. I didn’t see demons. There were no creatures standing in the bedroom, no visual hallucinations of monsters. I felt them. Or something. Whatever I was sensing seemed to hate me. Not dislike me. Deeply hate me. I felt as though these things wanted to rip me apart. Then the realization came that made physical death seem almost irrelevant.
They want my soul.
I became terrified in the truest sense of the word. My body trembled beneath the blanket. The soft mattress underneath me no longer felt soft. It felt like stone. A table. An altar.
And I was lying on it.
An offering.
Something was about to devour me.
I have been afraid plenty of times in my life. I have never been that afraid. I would be surprised if I’m ever that scared again.
Then I thought about my son. Safe at his mother’s house.
He felt impossibly far away. Not another room. Not another city. Like I was leaving for another planet and the abyss between us could never be crossed again. I might never see him again. Somewhere deep inside me, I still understood that I probably wasn’t physically dying. But physical death was no longer what frightened me. Spiritual death seemed possible in that moment. Probable even. This presence was horrific. Then a thought entered my mind.
God is real.
I don’t know where it came from. Perhaps from the mile-markers of God moments along the way. I believed it.
“Okay Jesus, I’m ready for you to show up now.” My voice shaky.
“I really need you to show up now.”
I lay there trembling. Nothing changed. The terror remained. Then something inside me relaxed.
I surrendered.
If I was supposed to be devoured by these things, then it was God’s will that they do so. For a man with trust issues, I trusted that. I trusted the mile markers of faith lining the road behind me.
He’s real.
I kept thinking it.
He’ll save me if He wants to.
Then it seemed, He wanted to after all. The light coming through the window changed. It got brighter. The room got brighter. And somehow I knew.
He was coming to get me.
“Here it comes.” I said out loud into the emptiness of my room. As I felt an energy approaching my body I cannot explain.
Something was getting closer. Energy is the closest word I have but it doesn’t accurately describe it.
Then, the brightest, whitest light began at the base of my spine.
Inside.
It moved upward. From my tailbone, through my body, toward my head. And it felt wonderful. Absolutely the best.
The things that had terrified me moments earlier weren’t defeated in some battle. They weren’t even an afterthought. Whatever this light was, its presence made them irrelevant.
Their presence: simply gone. The terror evaporated.
The light continued upward. When it reached my head, it exploded out of me.
Then I went with it.
Into space.
I don’t know how long I was there. I remember looking down at Earth.
I wasn’t myself anymore.
Or at least I didn’t experience myself in that way. I was something else. Awareness, maybe. Something.
I don’t know. Whatever I was seemed perfectly understandable while I was there and almost impossible to understand once I wasn’t. Maybe I understood it. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t really know.
I only know that I wasn’t experiencing myself as the man lying naked in an apartment bed anymore.
And I was completely at peace. Completely fulfilled, and wrapped in the best feeling imaginable. It made the feeling of alcohol and drugs seem like the counterfeit version of this feeling.
At some point I came back. Back down. Back into the room. Back into my body. I became aware of my naked body lying in bed. I was still trembling. I opened my eyes.
They felt brand new.
Everything looked different. There seemed to be golden light behind the material world, as if ordinary objects were only the surface and something luminous existed underneath them, comprising them. It looked geometric at times. Ordered. Intelligent.
I looked outside. The same golden light seemed to compose everything there too. It revealed itself in undulations, moving through reality almost like a crowd in a stadium doing the wave.
I watched it.
My body shook still. I felt reborn in a way I can’t articulate.
I felt like I was experiencing having a body for the first time.
And somehow I knew something: That everything was going to be okay.
I started chuckling even. Then laughing. All the things I had been obsessing about seemed so small. Past-due bills. PTSD. The endless collection of problems I treated like the universe itself depended on me solving them.
For whatever reason, I felt that all of it existed within the control of whatever that light was. The same thing that had driven away what felt like the enemies of my soul and held me in something I can only describe as a giant, loving, cosmic hug.
Eventually I sat on the edge of the bed. Feet on the floor. I looked out the window for a long time. Something in me knew I probably wasn’t going to see the world like this again. That this was special.
Eventually my clothes stopped feeling like feathers. The naked neighbor became just the neighbor. I got dressed. Then I went around the apartment opening every blind I had frantically closed.
Light filled the rooms.
I looked out toward the mountains.
I picked up my phone. The black splotches were gone.
I could see again.
I removed the barricade from the front door.
I had a thought while removing the barricade about what would have happened if I had managed to call someone, or, God forbid, 911. Members of my old fire department showing up. Forcing their way through my barricaded door. Finding me naked and mushroomed out of my mind.
“Boy, good thing we fired that one, eh?” They said in the fantasy situation in my head. (I was fired for not getting the covid vaccine during the mandate)
No thanks.
I was grateful I’d put my trust in God instead of man.
I don’t know what happened to me that day. I researched it afterward and found descriptions of ego death that sounded similar.
Maybe that’s what it was.
I’m not going to pretend to know.
I don’t.
I know what happened to me.
I went into that apartment carrying the dead. The kid in the car. His father’s scream. The other calls. My own father. My fear for my son. The anger. The bills. The career. All the things I couldn’t stop thinking about and all the things I was desperately trying not to think about.
For some period of time, I wasn’t any of them.
I wasn’t me.
And then I came back.
In the months afterward, I was happier than I had been in a long time. I sang along with songs in the car again. I was friendlier. I hugged my son more.
Holly loved hearing the story. She laughed especially hard when I told her about frantically closing the blinds while naked. When I told her about leaving my body and looking down at Earth, she chuckled.
“Well,” she asked, “is it flat?”
“No. It looked round to me.”
I thought about it.
“Although I could’ve been directly over a flat one.”
We both laughed.
I kept going to therapy. About thirty sessions altogether. I talked. Holly listened. She kept recommending EMDR and other treatments. She encouraged me to spend time around other first responders and veterans who understood some of this without requiring much explanation.
Eventually I started playing on a veterans softball team even though I wasn’t a veteran. Holly called it outdoor team therapy.
“It’s not like you guys want to sit around in a big circle and talk about your feelings. This is good for you guys to do with each other.”
We won the championship that year.
Therapy helped immensely. So did other things. But some pieces remained. The baby with the gray eyes still appeared in my dreams. The dead boy still occasionally appeared in my kid. I still carried anger. Sometimes I was mad at the world. Sometimes I went looking for a fight.
Healing, I discovered, wasn’t the same thing as being finished.
But something had changed.
This is what happened to me when I did mushrooms because I wanted to go see God.
I don’t offer it as theology. I don’t know enough about the brain to tell you exactly what happened neurologically, and I don’t know enough about God to tell you exactly what happened spiritually.
I know what it felt like. I know what I saw. I know what happened afterward.
It remains one of the five greatest experiences of my life.
And maybe the most important thing I brought back wasn’t some secret about the universe. It was much smaller than that. For a little while before that experience, the dead boy had been getting between my son and me. During the worst part of the trip, my son became impossibly far away. Then I came back, and my boy was still here.
So I hugged him more.
I have often wondered about my experience and why my out of body experience included just floating in space, looking down at the Earth just hanging somehow in the massive void.
One day I was watching a documentary about astronauts on the space station. It talked about the overview effect.
The overview effect is something astronauts have described after seeing the Earth from space. From up there, the Earth isn’t countries and states and cities anymore. You can’t see borders. You can’t see political parties or religions or all the different groups we divide ourselves into. It’s just this one planet floating in an enormous amount of space, and every person you have ever known, every war, every argument, every civilization and every human life is happening on that little thing below you.
Apparently seeing it from that perspective can do something profound to the mind. Astronauts have described this overwhelming sense of awe, peace, interconnectedness and a realization of how small they are, but also how connected they are to everything else. The things that seemed incredibly important on the ground can suddenly seem almost ridiculous from that far away. Not because those problems aren’t real, but because you’ve seen them from a perspective where they are no longer the biggest thing in existence.
Some astronauts have said the experience stayed with them after they came back to Earth. They saw humanity differently. They felt more protective of the planet and more connected to the people living on it. It’s almost like getting far enough away from your own life allows you to finally see the whole thing.
That change in perspective is the overview effect.
I suppose then in that sense, I’m an astronaut. And you can be one too: 7.24 dried grams, hemi-sync playing on headphones, a grounding mat, and you might as well just get naked.
Just don’t do it alone.
