Took 0.5g of P Envy shrooms in a Lemon Tek around 2:55pm, trip lasted until 5:15pm. Compared to my 3.5g last month, this time felt much more medicinal and embodied. I never felt disconnected from reality. Wrote down plenty of notes in my notebook, no screens...
3 to 3:30 — Weaker attention, foliage of the redwood trees outside looks like non-human feathered angels (though not many eyes), spots in the periphery remind me of eyes and I felt watched by them. Time immediately felt slower around 3:10. Slight nausea in stomach and upper torso. Felt heart beating and breathing more acutely.
3:30 to 4:00 — Harder time speaking. Face still felt blushed. Verbal thoughts more irregular, with notable gaps between them. Depth perception improved, noticeably so, yet objects/surfaces in the distance seemed to approach at a speed that was also somewhat nauseating. Less auditory noise, better signal; improved auditory processing? A quieter kind of world, almost like how a baby's or child's bourgeoning mind might feel. Very conscious and aware of breathing and heartbeat — physical feeling of anxiety. Redwoods foliage outside looked like a lattice if I kept my eyes still. Less neurosis and overthinking.
4:00 to 4:30 — Visual attention fixation feels cinematic, like how a crew would frame a moving shot, the way that certain forms align with each other. Social anxiety felt diminished, breathing felt more slowed and more normal. Optimism for the future. Realization that less anti-aliasing = MORE aliasing of fine detail. Visuals without glasses blobbed together into slight geometries and networks, but they dissolve quickly. Things that are still remain still; things that are in motion seem to move with great physical vigor; a kind of "frozen asset" effect. Time perception still very slow. Effects seem to calm down more; effects are strongest in the parafovea and periphery.
4:30 to 5:00 — Greater attention directed into fine detail of the redwood foliage. The convolved microtexture reminded me less of fractals and more of clusters of retinal ganglion fields, with fine points of concentric circles of alternating brightness between leaves and branches. This fine texture was exactly the hypnagogia that I see when I drift off to sleep, but the hypnagogia are concentrated in the foveal region, and not all over my visual field. Very subtle effect. Visual lag and afterimages since the start of the trip remind me that these perceptual echoes are of the past, but not really of the future. Had a broader understanding of gender and identity — what you must be do to be seen is to allow yourself to be seen, and what you afford to others is a genderless act. Elegance of being — the elegance that refined my motions, propped up my head in the half-hours earlier, blandished my handwriting on the notebook — is agender. Love without self-gender is arbitrary selection, yet the arbitrariness still is embodied in want and desire. And as the quality of light changes over the foliage and the little parking lot and all the dirt under the trees so will I — not without self but suffused with many selves, of man and woman and nonbinary and many others. Self is of selves. Adulthood selects a few selves but still does not collapse into a single wholly defining self.
5:00 to 5:15 — Perception seems to normalize. Understanding that a single label of my gender gives me anxiety, yet the consequences of being label-less are also significant; null vs. value of 0. Ganglion circles seem to merge into lines, but a few dots still there. Mention of "gravity" in the music through my noise-cancelling headphones gave me a little intuition this experience was ending, and gracefully. Last few ganglion dots at 5:17 and by the time I went out to eat dinner with Shruti, Ava, and Sasha at Rachel Carson around 5:45 all the hallucinations were gone, and I felt — and still do now feel — peace.
This trip didn't have as strong visuals as my 3.5g trip, but the "oh this X reminds me of Y" was just as strong, if not more so.