Tribal HarmonixEntheogenic pagan fellowship
Testimony

What the journeyers bring back

More than sixty first-person accounts of mushroom journeys, most of them taken alone and at very large doses, written by strangers and read aloud on the internet, read here by people who keep the rite. They are testimony: not evidence about what is out there, and never instruction. Where they shine we say so, and where they went wrong we say how. For what to do on a hard night, see Hard nights.

In the files

Fifty-four recordings
More than sixty separate accounts of nights between 2001 and 2025, first posted to Erowid, the Shroomery or Reddit, or sent straight to the narrator.

Who was in the room

Someone sober, a handful of times
Most journeyed alone, or beside friends who had taken the same. At least eight were under twenty-one.

What went in

Large, unweighed, often mixed
Nearly half had something else in them: cannabis most often; also LSD, DMT, ketamine, MDMA, alcohol, a sedative and an MAOI. No figure on this page is a guide to anything.
How to read this page

Testimony, not evidence, not instruction

A trip report tells you what one night was like for one person, as they remembered it and chose to tell it. That is worth a great deal. It is not worth everything.

The longer argument is in the Library essay Reading other people's nights. In short, every account on this page passed through three filters before it reached us.

Who tells

The dramatic nights get told

People write up the night that shook them, not the twentieth gentle one, and a narrator picks the reports that will hold a listener. The files lean toward the extremes, terror and glory, and say almost nothing about ordinary evenings.

What was taken

Nobody knows the dose

Most amounts were guessed, rounded, or bought from strangers. Strength varies by species, strain and batch, and even from one mushroom to the next, and nearly half the nights had something else in them. A gram figure in a report is a story about a bag, not a measurement.

How it is told

Memory makes the shape

Some reports were written the next morning, some years later. Memory under a psychedelic is unreliable: one writer trusted a "memory" for a month before finding it had been a hallucination. Told and retold, a night becomes a story with a lesson, and the lesson can arrive after the night.

Why we read strangers and never our own

Our scribes record what a circle decided, never what anyone saw, and what is shared in circle stays there. None of the accounts on this page comes from a member. Each was made public by its author, or sent by its author to be read aloud on a public channel. We have left out names, places and anything else that could identify anyone, and the passages that belong to nobody but the person who lived them. We read them as the History page reads the old sources: closely, gratefully, and with the grades on.

Six movements, three missing

Held against the shape of a rite

Every rite we keep moves through six movements, set out on The Path. Lay the reports beside them and a pattern shows at once: the journey is always there, and the movements that hold it usually are not.

This is the plainest finding on the page, and the reason the page exists.

  1. Preparation

    Weeks, in our practice. In the reports, often a day or an hour: a decision made the night before "to meet God", leftovers eaten because they were there. Even the most careful met hard nights; one fasted for two days and locked every door, then ate far more than anyone could carry. Preparation is necessary. It is not a licence.

  2. Opening

    Almost entirely missing. A few lit a candle, said a prayer or spoke an intention aloud; one father cleared the house with smoke and put the knives away. Hardly anyone named an exit, a signal for help, or a person whose word would end the night.

  3. Invocation

    Where it appears it is moving: a silent prayer to "the mushroom spirits to go easy", an explorer's vow "to find something and bring it back". Where it turned into a demand, to be tested, to be shown the dark side, to be taken "as gone as possible", the reports suggest the demand was usually granted.

  4. The journey

    Always present, and most of every report: the come-up, the dissolving, the terror or the light, the long road back. For most writers it was the whole of the rite, and the only part they thought to describe. The rest of this page is about what happened in it.

  5. Closing

    Rare, and accidental when it came. People woke on towels, in a stranger's tent, in a hospital bed, in a cell. The best closings were improvised by others: a father who sat his son down in front of the television, a nurse who told a terrified man he was alive, strangers at a festival who wrapped a muddy young man in a towel and heard his confession.

  6. Integration

    Usually the report itself, written soon after and posted to strangers. A few did the slow work: months of honest conversation, therapy, a cleaner room, a call to a parent. Several did the opposite, journeying again within days or planning a bigger dose next time.

First there are wanderings, and journeys through the dark; then, before the end, every kind of terror, shuddering and trembling, sweat and amazement. And after this a marvellous light meets the wanderer. A fragment attributed to Plutarch, likening death to initiation into the great Mysteries, preserved by the anthologist Stobaeus
The inner arc

Terror, then a light

Read sixty of these in a row and you meet the same night again and again, in five stages an initiate of Eleusis might have recognised.

Not every report has all five, and some stop at the third. Those are the ones Hard nights is for. The ancient parallel is argued, not proven; see Terror, then a light.

  1. The first hour

    The threshold

    Nausea, yawning, cold hands, a wave of anxiety with no object. Some felt it arrive "like a train"; others felt nothing for an hour and took more, which is the commonest avoidable mistake in the files. Either way, the body arrives first.

  2. The rising

    The struggle

    The room breathes, time slips, and the person tries to hold on. Here the reports divide. Those who fought, by analysing, reaching for a phone or trying to make it stop, describe being beaten "like I was in a cosmic washing machine". Those who let go describe the same force as a current.

  3. The peak

    The dying

    Nearly every report at the largest doses contains a death, felt as certain and physical, sometimes with a funeral. "My last coherent thought was that I was going to miss my son, because surely I was about to die." The self comes apart into loops, fragments and other people's lives. Three fears recur: I have died; I have gone mad for ever; this will never end.

  4. After the dying

    The light

    Then, for most, something opens: unity, love, white light, a heavenly choir, a presence that says it will be all right. "It is okay, all is okay." The same writer called what came before "only a massive deprogramming". Some met it as God, some as the universe, one as his late grandmother's embrace.

  5. The return

    Coming home

    The body comes back in pieces: a hand, a name, a family. People wept, laughed, ate, slept and watched the sunrise. Several describe a gratitude for ordinary life sharper than anything at the peak: "immense gratitude for being back in my normal puny self."

Seven marks, in their own words

What the laboratory measures, as the journeyers said it

The researchers' seven marks of a mystical experience are set out on What the laboratory found. Every one of them turns up in these reports, in plainer words than any questionnaire.

None of these writers was answering a survey, which makes the match worth noticing. It also proves less than it seems: several had read the same books, and some had read about the same studies.

I

Unity

"I had that kind of mycelium connection with those around me." A young woman alone in a treehouse on a late-summer afternoon, who met an owl and a mother spider and came back crying.

II

Sacredness

"In a way I felt that it brought out the god in me, the god that exists within everything." A young man on one of the smallest doses in the files, in his mother's bed, with his dog and a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

III

Noetic quality

"Once you've seen that reality can be pierced and you can go through the hole, then subsequently it breaks your definition of reality." A sceptic in his forties who worked in software, and came home believing in God.

IV

Deeply felt positive mood

"I felt like I belonged for the first time in my life." A father of two, walking an empty street before dawn on Christmas morning, singing three words to himself.

V

Transcendence of time and space

"It was like experiencing a year of life in half a day." A long-time student of Buddhist philosophy with a meditation practice of their own.

VI

Ineffability

"It's really hard to describe in details what happened next." A guide at a retreat centre, at the point in his report where the words run out.

VII

Paradoxicality

"Both nothing and everything simultaneously, significant and insignificant at the same time." A man who had lived for years with depression, writing about the night afterwards.

What the questionnaire has no box for

Beings, the dead, the gods of home, the earth, the voice

The laboratory's definition leaves out visions, voices, beings and the dead. In these reports they are half the night.

We do not tell anyone what they met. Our circles hold devout polytheists, animists and naturalists side by side, and each reads these encounters differently. How we hold all three is in the Library essay Who did they meet?

Beings

The ones who were waiting

A green-and-gold mantis who told one man to finish his shower and go to bed. A team of warm presences, one of whom said, "think of me as your doctor, we'll take good care of you." Jesters and clowns who laughed at a frightened young man; elves running machinery inside a student's body; a thing with tentacles and many eyes at midnight. Three strangers, years apart, met mantis-like keepers of the human world. Across the files one rule held: the being matched the state of the person who met it.

Ancestors

The dead

A late grandmother's embrace, with messages only she would have known. A father, newly dead, who in one son's words "went home". A young man's own funeral, with every mourner's reaction. The ancestors the questionnaire leaves out are the ones our Samhain rite exists to honour.

The gods of home

The house you grew up in

One man became Yahweh, "stirring the oceans with my finger", and then "a lonely god". Another, raised Catholic, decided there was something "bigger than Jesus, bigger than God". A third, raised Christian, lived through Eden as Adam, as Eve, as Cain, and came out able to forgive their own family. The images came from the shelf each person grew up beside. That tells us something about the images. It does not settle what lay behind them.

The earth

A conversation with the land

A man who had eaten an ounce described "a full-on conversation with the mother earth" and vowed to fix her. A young woman watched spider silk drift across a field and later felt the whole night had come through Gaia. A mantis told another: "just do something, help yourself, help your neighbors, try to heal the world." Our answer to messages like these is the one in The earth is the first temple: show us what you did for the land by Lughnasadh.

The voice

Tongues, chant and song

A lifelong atheist who could not stop speaking in a language he did not know: "It felt as though something was laughing through me." A man who chanted a single syllable for hours until each repetition felt like a birth. A father who sang "love, joy, peace" down a dark street until his terror broke. The oldest way across the hedge is the voice, and the reports keep finding it again.

What came home

Fruits, not roots

William James judged religious experience by what it did to a life. By that test the reports give a mixed and honest answer.

What lasted

Repair, gratitude, a gentler voice

A young woman who spent a night punishing herself learned that "it is okay to need people sometimes". Someone who felt the pain of thousands called their father, then their mother, told them they loved them, and cleaned their room. A father who was sure for four hours that he had lost his mind came back with a new patience for chores. A writer who relived Eden came away with four words: "Maybe I can choose love."

What hurt

Months, years, a changed world

Two therapists and a psychiatrist over thirty months, after a first DMT journey on top of mushrooms. Half a year of fragility after one enormous solitary night. Panic attacks still easing two years on. Vision altered for good after one cup of tea. A certainty, long after the night, "that I am alone and I can never die". These were not the worst nights in the files, only the ones whose writers told us what came after.

What we cannot know

Most reports end at breakfast

We do not know whether the gratitude lasted, whether the divorce one man credited to his night was wise, or whether the young man who now takes very large doses regularly is well. Testimony shows what a night was like. Only a life shows what it was for, and the life happens after the report ends. See After the journey.

What we do not take from them

Six habits of the reports that stay out of our circles

We are grateful to every writer in these files. We have also learned from them what not to do, and most of them say the same.

Each of these is answered by a rule on the Safety page or a sign on The Path.

  • The dose as a trophy.

    The titles give it away: ten grams, twenty, thirty, an ounce. Grams became a way of ranking nights, and the reports do not bear the ranking out. One of the smallest doses in the files gave one writer the deepest night of his life; one of the largest gave another a demon and two years of panic. See The heroic dose and the humble one.

  • The night alone.

    The advice to go alone in silent darkness runs all through these files. It went well for a few experienced people in quiet rooms. It also left a frightened man hiding in a shop's toilet, a sixteen-year-old alone in a shower, and a young man running barefoot into a forest at night. Our rites are never solitary.

  • The dare.

    "Show me their dark side." "Test me to the fullest." Go towards fear. Writers who asked to be tested usually were, and called it hell afterwards. Courage in a rite is meeting what comes, not ordering the worst of it.

  • The throne.

    "I am God" is one of the commonest sentences in the files, and it rarely stays happy for long: "I am a lonely god." One writer was certain his night was "the most important thing that's ever happened". Inflation is the oldest hazard of ecstatic religion; The Path calls it the chosen one.

  • The street.

    The worst nights moved: to a supermarket, a concert, a festival path, a wood beside a railway line. Every public place in the files made the journey harder, and two nights ended in handcuffs, one at a concert and one on a hospital bed. See The night the police came.

  • The cocktail.

    Cannabis to smooth it out, a second psychedelic to peak together, a sedative to stop it, a party's worth of everything. Nearly half the nights had something else in them, and the mixtures account for most of the medical emergencies in the files. See the combinations on our Safety page.

Their nights are not our rites. Their lessons are.

What the reports teach about hard nights, and about the long return.

Hard nightsAfter the journey