Titel : What’s it like to use VR on magic mushrooms?
Link : What’s it like to use VR on magic mushrooms?
What’s it like to use VR on magic mushrooms?
“Why is this so life-affirming?” Lexi asks me. “I feel like someone’s pouring hot chocolate into my soul.”
Tucked away in a finished basement, I’m watching her trek through her own virtual reality. I’m there to watch over her and keep her safe because she’s just taken a few grams of psychedelic mushrooms.
For as long as dystopian cyberpunk has been a thing, virtual reality has been looming over us as one of many future-bound apocalyptic scenarios. The story goes that virtual spaces will be so much better, so much more satisfying than reality that we’ll simply cease to be people. As with any mind-altering tech, though, there’s a wave of people hoping that this tech will enhance their life. Taking cues from earlier movements, these neo-psychonauts are the first wave of explorers, hoping to find pieces of themselves scattered across hallucinogen-augmented virtual landscape.
While the name has come to refer to a popular, mid 2000s adventure game, “psychonauts” was originally used to describe those who explored the mind. “In the same way and for the same reasons cosmonauts explore the cosmos, I want to see the deepest parts of myself,” Lexi tells me. “VR is just one more tool in that kit.”
“Lexi” asks me to use her pseudonym, for obvious reasons, but she’s far from alone in her journeys. Entire communities have sprung up around the concept. With the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and even cheaper options like Galaxy VR and Google Cardboard, programmers, designers, artists, and musicians have been trading around VR games and VR-enhanced songs.
“They’re a lot like the old Mind’s Eye movies,” she says. “You’ll start somewhere normal like a messy bedroom in a suburban house… but in moments you’re transported out of everything.”
As I watch her float through space on my screen, I see wondrous shape-shifting voids that slowly turn into faces, then four dark figures reaching towards her, before they melt into a golden pyramid.
“In pop culture we’re sold this fuzzy idea of what tripping looks like. It’s weird, there are crazy shapes everywhere, and it’s often this really scary place. That only happens with insane dosages. Most people just feel closer to everything, euphoric. Yeah it’s not the real world, but it’s not entirely foreign either.”
With these games and videos, though, that’s not the case. They are exactly what most of us imagine what we think an acid trip is like. And that’s the kicker, Lexi says, this gets you closer to a world that doesn’t exist. It’s one thing to feel more connected to yourself and to the real world you live in, but navigating these spaces and connecting to them can connect you to things that go beyond reality because, she reflects, “VR can show you anything.”
She takes a rest, I get her some water and a bit of food before she takes another dose. She carefully breaks apart the mushrooms and sprinkles them over a burger before drowning it in ketchup.
“They taste like shit. The worst.”
When she jumps back in, she wants to start up something a bit calmer, so we load up Tilt Brush. A simple app that’s a bit like Microsoft Paint in VR. She’s used the program before, but this is the first time she tries it while tripping.
“This is going to be amazing,” she tells me with a sinister grin.
It starts out simple enough — she rotates the controllers on her Vive to change her brush type, and then she starts painting. She flips between a few backgrounds before settling on one that surrounds her with stars and gets to work.
She starts by selecting a brush called “hypercolor,” and carves into her reality what any giddy, tripping 20-something might — drawing three dimensional penises. As she puts the finishing touches on her first scrotum she can’t help but cackle.
“Wait, I have an idea!” she belts excitedly. “Fire!”
Seconds later I’m watching this digital phallic mural ejaculate fire in all the colors of the rainbow. Lexi’s joy is infectious. At this point it’s not about the literal concept of a penis coming flames as it is her marvel at such a ridiculous image enveloping her. She painted it in a circle around where she stood so that the whole eight-foot behemoth was everywhere she looked.
“Wanna see?” she giggles before tearing off the headset and calling me over.
Sure enough, it’s a striking site, crudely doodled pubic hairs and all. I could see her detached fascination with the strangeness of the human body filtered through the lens of technology. It was just as edifying for me as I started thinking about how strange genitals and what so many choose to do with them are. But just as I felt myself tilting into my own reflexive high, she shouted, “My turn!”
Like a real-world manic pixie dream girl, she bounced around eager to see as many weird things as she could before the psychedelics wore off. But at this point, she was pretty far gone.
She walked around some packed-in three-dimensional paintings. A space-bound dragon. An elaborate snowman. And a giant red mushroom flecked with white which sent her into another giggle fit, before quipping, “I’m on those!” After a few minutes, she went back to trying to make something herself, but she didn’t get very far.
After carefully scrolling through the available brushes she found one called “rainbows,” that she greeted with a charming “ooooh.” She grabbed her virtual brush and twirled around tracing a descending spiral of rotating colors. When she stood back up to look at her work she paused and took off the headset.
“Oh my god. There’s rainbows. Raaaaaaainbows.” She fell to the floor and started crying, “I just need to take a second to cry from happiness.” She looked up at me with teary, gleeful eyes before muttering once again, “There are rainbows.”
We spend the rest of the time talking, digesting what she’d done and seen. Her trip’s a gentle rollercoaster, short bursts of sobriety punctuating bits of contented incoherence. Through it though, she was mostly lucid — her experience just altered, augmented. She’d focus on the lines or patterns in the ceiling or on a baseboard before referencing Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” and the idea that our lives are meaningless in the sea of reality.
When she comes down for the final time, it’s calming, gentle. She’s just back, but more serene. More contented. The effect lasts for weeks, she later tells me. She doesn’t take another dose for a while, but she feels that she’s just… better.
If Lexi’s emblematic of other VR psychonauts, I can’t imagine this being the world-ending technology that some may fear. Her experiences have been transformative, and while that’s hardly rare, it hasn’t come to dominate her life. More it’s just the occasional accent to otherwise pleasant being.
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