When the journey turns
What a difficult journey feels like from inside, what helped the people who came through one, what the warden does, and when a hard night becomes an emergency. Drawn from the accounts on our Testimony page and from warden training. It is not medical advice and it is not a dosing guide. Read the Safety page first.
If someone is in danger right now
Unresponsive, having a seizure, chest pain, breathing trouble, a very high temperature, or you are frightened for them: call your local emergency number now. Do not wait to see if it passes. Do not worry about the law before you worry about the person. Tell the dispatcher what was taken if you know; it changes the treatment. The full list of warning signs is further down this page.
The rules that save lives, and the nights that broke them
Our eight rules of harm reduction were not written from the reports. Every one of them is illustrated by them.
Names, places and identifying details are left out. The quotations are the writers' own words.
Never alone
A nineteen-year-old took a large dose of mushrooms and four hits of LSD, alone in his room, on the night before a family holiday. By dawn he had run barefoot into a wood, broken a glass at home, and been taken to hospital, where he woke restrained. His own verdict: "if I had a friend with me this could have all been avoided."
Know what it is
A bag bought as one strain turned out to be another. A dealer's warning not to take more than three grams arrived by text after two friends had each eaten about nine. A young man weighed his mushrooms, did not believe the scale, and "told myself it was seven". A sitter loaded nearly three times the agreed amount of DMT without saying so. Not knowing is not a detail. It is the night.
Nothing mixed
Five hits of LSD on top of mushrooms ended in a police tackle and a weekend in a county jail. Syrian rue, an MAOI, turned a modest amount of mushrooms into hours of visions of hell and a false memory that lasted a month. A farm campfire with a research dissociative, a strong painkiller and mushrooms left one friend drifting in and out of consciousness until dawn, watched over by people who had taken the same. Cannabis, reached for to calm a panic, deepened it far more often than it eased it. The full list is under combinations.
Less is more
The doses in the files run from a gram and a half to more than an ounce. The writer of one of the smallest called it the deepest night of his life. The writers of the largest describe hours they cannot remember, the loss of their bodies, and in one case half a year before he felt like himself again. A man who drank an enormous tea of fresh mushrooms put it plainly: "I will never go this far down the rabbit hole again."
Water, not floods
A first-timer with a throat parched dry was certain he was dying of a heart attack, until his friend's father brought him a glass of water: "Greatest cup of water of my life." Another, overheating in a crowded hall, ran to find water and fell on the stairs. A third spent hours alone in a hot tub at the temperature of a fever. Heat, thirst and panic feel alike from inside.
No driving
A young man who had driven his friends to a festival ate most of a bag of mushrooms of unknown strength. He had put his keys in the glove box before he began, the one piece of planning in his night, and the car stayed where it was. Luck is not a plan. Every rite decides before it begins how each person gets home.
Know the law
The man arrested at a concert left hospital for a county detention centre and stayed there until friends paid his bail. Another writer believed his city had "decriminalized" psychedelics; it had asked its police to treat them as a low priority, and they remained illegal under state and federal law. Decriminalised is not legal, and a bad night in public is how most people meet the law.
Say it before the cup
A young ceremonial magician hid his journey from his parents, and the fear of being found out became the whole night. A man living with depression, post-traumatic stress and what he called bipolar tendencies took a large dose alone in the dark. Neither told anyone who could have helped them decide. Tell your warden the truth; it is the first act of the rite.
Six things a hard night says, and what answered them
The content of hard nights is endlessly various. The fears underneath are not. These six account for nearly every difficult passage in the files.
Each comes with what the writers themselves found helped. None of it replaces a sober person in the room.
"I have died."
The commonest terror in the files, and the most convincing. People read ordinary things as proof: a locked door, the back of a police car, the white light of a hospital scanner. One believed for eight hours that he was dead.
What answered it: a person saying, gently and more than once, that they were alive and cared for. A nurse did it; so did a friend's mother rubbing a frightened boy's back at four in the morning.
"I have gone mad for ever."
"I genuinely thought I'd lost my mind." One father wrote that it was not the visions that were awful but "the ego's lies and stories": that his mind was broken, that his children had lost their father.
What answered it: remembering, or being told, that this is the substance and that it ends. Every writer in the files came down, though not all came back unchanged.
"It will never end."
The same moment lived twenty times; a number repeating in the head for an hour and a half; a conversation that kept restarting. A loop feels eternal from inside and lasts minutes from outside.
What answered it: accepting the loop instead of fighting it, and changing something real: the light, the music, the room. One young man broke a long despair by getting up and walking into the room where his pet was.
"I am God, and I am alone."
If everything is me, there is no one else. "I am a lonely god." One writer still believed, long afterwards, that he was alone and could never die.
What answered it: another person's face. A partner waking at dawn, a family coming home, a wife's voice asking "are you okay". The cure for that loneliness is company, not argument.
"Everyone can see."
It ran through every night spent in a shop, a street or a family home: shoppers who looked dead behind the eyes, police taken for "God's police", a mother about to open the door.
What answered it: a private room, leaving the public place, and parents who stayed calm. What did not was shouting: "Please if anyone who hears this is a parent, do not yell, do not become irate."
"My body is failing."
A racing heart, a burning chest, forgetting to breathe, sudden heat, numb limbs, the bladder letting go. Most of it in the files was panic and the body's ordinary response to a psychedelic. Some of it may not have been.
What answered it: water, slow breath, lying on one side, and someone sober enough to tell the difference, and to call for help when they could not.
Six things the writers wished they had known
If someone is in physical danger, stop reading and call your emergency number. If it is your mind that is frightening you, read on, slowly.
You took something, and it will end.
Everyone on our Testimony page came down: the ones who were sure they had died, the ones sure they were mad for ever. This is the substance. Hours, not for ever.
Stay where you are.
Stay indoors and stay put. The streets, shops, woods and concert halls in the reports made every hard night harder.
Tell someone.
Wake the sober person in the house, or call a friend you trust. "It is okay to need people sometimes," wrote a young woman whose worst night turned when she walked out of a cold, dark room and asked for help.
Breathe out for longer than you breathe in.
Sip water. Lie on your side if you feel sick. Wrap up if you are cold; open a window if you are hot.
Let it move through you.
Fighting is what turned the current into a washing machine. The writers say it again and again: "do not try to resist any unpleasant feelings." Watch it pass like weather. Nothing you think tonight has to be decided tonight. One man, at the very bottom of his night, managed four words: "I decide to wait." Wait.
Take nothing else.
Not cannabis to calm it, not alcohol, not a pill from somebody's drawer. In the reports a second substance made things worse far more often than better.
What the reports teach the person who stays sober
The five steps on the Safety page are the core of warden training. The reports add six lessons, most of them learned the hard way by people who had no warden at all.
Wardens train with the Zendo Project's Manual of Psychedelic Support and a psychological first aid course. Nothing here replaces either.
Be the sober one
Of more than sixty accounts, only a handful had anyone sober in the room, and those nights bent toward catharsis: a calm friend who held a weeping young woman for hours and asked good questions; a silent friend with a bucket and water; an old friend, mostly sober, who opened the blinds. One sitter caused the harm, by loading a dose he did not disclose. Sobriety is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Name the world back
Who they are, where they are, that they are alive, that this is the substance, that it will end. One sitter did it with a name and an address: "this is your apartment." Say it softly, and as often as it is needed.
Guard the door, not the person
Every journey in the files that went out into public went worse. Keep the journeyer in the warded space and change what is in it: light, music, a different room, an open window, a blanket. Never restrain anyone. If you cannot keep someone safe without force, call for help.
Never shout, never trick, never dose
A mother's shouting turned one night into hell. A friend's prank at the peak, a bottle cap where the journeyer expected to find the universe, crashed another. A sitter's undisclosed extra dose was followed by years of therapy. A warden's authority rests on being trusted completely.
Watch the body
Vomiting while unable to move, fainting with the eyes open, overheating, a friend who will not stay conscious: these are where the reports came closest to a death nobody lived to write about. Turn them on their side, keep the air cool, keep the phone in your hand.
Hold the morning
Food, warmth, sleep, no decisions. Many writers posted their report within hours, and several journeyed again within days. The warden's last task is to make sure the next step is sleep, and the one after that a conversation. See After the journey.
Most say it mattered. Some needed help.
Many writers in our files called their worst night their most valuable. Others needed months, a therapist, or both, and a few never journeyed again. A large survey of difficult mushroom experiences, published by a Johns Hopkins team in 2016, found the same split: most respondents said they had benefited, and a minority had put themselves or others at risk, needed medical help, or sought treatment for symptoms that lasted. The figures are on our research page. The authors linked the risk to larger doses, longer and harder nights, and the absence of comfort and support: the very things a warded circle exists to provide.
So we do not tell anyone that their hard night was a gift. One narrator put the warning better than we could: "not all bad trips can culminate in a deeper understanding of the self; it can actually trigger PTSD and a load of other problems." The meaning of a hard night belongs to the person who had it, to find later, with help if they want it.
If something will not settle, in days or in weeks, read When it does not settle and talk to a clinician. Tell them what you took. In the United States the Fireside Project offers free, confidential peer support in the meantime.
When a hard night becomes an emergency
- They cannot be woken, or keep drifting out of consciousness.
- A seizure, chest pain, or breathing that is slow, noisy or stops.
- A very high temperature, especially with confusion.
- They are vomiting and cannot turn or sit up by themselves.
- A fall, a blow to the head, or any injury.
- They talk of harming themselves or anyone else, or try to.
- They have also taken alcohol, GHB, opioids or sedatives.
- They are leaving, and you cannot keep them safe.
Call your local emergency number. Say what was taken. Stay with them.
There is no quick way back
Several writers went looking for one: a search for how to stop it, a pill, a stronger smoke. One swallowed a sedative mid-journey without advice, and the fear grew anyway. Medical rescue is a decision for medics. The warden's tools are presence, water, breath, time, and the phone.
Read this before you need it.
Then read it again before you sit as anyone's warden.