In eighth grade I developed an interest in mushrooms. All kinds of mushrooms, big white ones, little brown ones; I realized that the more you keep your eye open for mushrooms the more mushrooms you find. They are truly all around you, creeping up grass, on woodchips, hay, and growing out of trees when the city becomes showered with winter rain. My friend and I were walking home from school on a Friday and on a long, wooded boulevard out of the corner of my eye by the bus stop appeared something big and red, which I first thought was a large soda bottle or some other artifact of trash left by someone many days ago, but as I did a double take and looked again I saw a huge fairy ring of magnificently large and brilliantly colored red mushrooms with tiny white dots.

Amanita caesarea I assumed. I was so sure of it. My friend believed so too, that these mushrooms were the highly valued edible mushrooms called ‘Caesar’s Amanita.’ We gathered them all up, digging them up from the dirt around the pine trees, and we shoved them in our backpacks and walked to my house with a smile on our faces at finding these difficult to identify (important information) and relatively uncommon mushrooms. My friend later went home, but the next day I wanted to cook them for lunch, so I sauted them and ate them up. They were quite good and not very similar to store-bought mushrooms at all. They tasted like chicken.

But I began to feel stranger and stranger until after an hour I stumbled into the garage and hurled into a bucket. This is when I knew something was wrong. As soon as I vomited, a strange feeling of detachment came over me and I felt like I was watching myself, dissociated from myself. I went to my computer, but operating it seemed like quite a foreign task, and the walls seemed to be moving and shifting. I looked up all the possible species of Amanita that it could have been, and I found one that matched the exact description of the mushrooms I had eaten. The only issue was that it was not A. caesarea. It was Amanita muscaria, a common hallucinogenic mushroom! I closed my computer and stared at the walls for a while, distracted. I went upstairs and tried to make popcorn and wait it out, but felt a sense of stimulation overpowering me and I felt the overwhelming urge to move around, so I paced back and forth in a rhythmic dance-like motion until I heard a heavy knock on the door. As I approached the door, reality seemed to come in slides, like someone kept pausing my vision and re-playing it.
Walking down the hallway seemed to take a while because of this disorientation that seemed like something was pulling me away from the world. I opened the door, sweating profusely like I had been since I vomited. It was my uncle, who was stopping by to talk to my grandma. He noticed nothing wrong, so I snuck back downstairs and lay in my bed waiting for the euphoria and stimulation to pass, but as soon as it did it was replaced by a strong sedation. Existence was accompanied by a lightness, humor; weightlessness flooded through me and every footstep felt like I was shifting through time and space, uncomfortably light, almost floating. I was utterly and completely detached from the existence of myself, what appeared to be the unadulterated, undiluted reality shifting in front of me. Sometime later I fell asleep, when I was greeted with bizarre dreams that attacked me in waves and slipped from my memory. One of them was a replaying of the events that had previously occurred, starting from the mushroom hunt.

I could not stay asleep, but instead woke up periodically in a void where I could only partially recognize the surroundings of my room, where I was a witness to colors and ideas and people who seemed to be there, speaking to me about something, guiding me perhaps. I do not remember much. I came out of this trance still feeling strange, but the effects had mostly subsided and I went out to dinner with my family and no one ever found out. But kids, don’t ever eat random mushrooms you find without the opinion of an expert, no matter how sure you think you are.