Hallucinogenics: Stories about tripping

In this week’s episode, our storytellers delve into their personal encounters with psychedelics—moments where reality became a blur, perceptions began to shift, and the boundaries of consciousness expanded.

Part 1: While tripping on acid, Michael Czajkowski goes into anaphylaxis.

Michael Czajkowski is an origami physicist, fashion redesigner, experimental science communicator and amateur bicycle pilot. Their research concerns materials that have been punctured, folded and otherwise damaged strategically so they will move in dramatic unusual and controllable ways. This research feeds into their greater goals, to connect tangible science with uncommon and underserved audiences. This is the focus of their work with Science for Georgia as Director of Advocacy. In their spare time, they like to maintain their social network: mikemingle.com

Part 2: Dust Cwaine sees their body differently while experimenting with magical mushrooms.

Dust Cwaine (aka David Cutting) is a Singer-Songwriter and Drag Artist. They are a Non-Binary Aromantic, known for their bright and earthy creativity. Dust’s art centers itself in the political nature of queer identity, evoking a sense of belonging and togetherness with their presence in live spaces. Dust Cwaine started Drag in 2016, since their debut They have Produced and Hosted over 250 shows, and They have written 3 Drag musicals. In 2020 Dust began creating music and released a demo album of tracks they created while in quarantine aptly titled AMATUER and on September 23rd 2022 they released Their debut LP Arcana in collaboration with Josh Eastman of Helm Studios. Dust’s music carries inspiration from the alt rock insurgence of the late 90’s and early 2000’s, lyrically weaving earnesty with humor, for an emotional familiarity that is immediately disarming. Their live shows involve a blending of drag and music that intentionally try to break down the walls between the performer and the audience, Dust refers to this as community, where everybody has an equally important part to play. You can listen to Dust Cwaine’s music on any streaming service, visit their website dustcwaine.ca to learn more! You can also find them on Instagram at @unicornriverchild

Episode Transcript

Part 1

Okay. This is a high octane story, so buckle up or whatever.

I'm lucky, in one particular way, in that I was born in Buffalo, New York, the land of plenty. Nobody calls Buffalo, New York the land of plenty, but we do call it the city of good neighbors, because that's true. People from Buffalo that I've met have all been warm, welcoming and really kind. As a result of this, I'm still friends with like 25 people that I've collected over the years through high school and into college, and these people are all friends with each other. I've come to learn that, apparently, this is kind of rare.

Michael Czajkowski shares their story at Waller’s Coffee Shop in Atlanta, GA in March 2023. Photo by Rob Felt.

But, also, you might not be able to guess from looking at me now, but I grew up a bro. I was raised by bros. I didn't always have all of these friends around me. I actually struggled for a while to have any friends and to socialize with people. So, when the bros took me in and took me under their wing, I adapted. I connected with them and, like so many teenagers before me, I found a sense of identity in partying.

And this partying it followed me to grad school. At Syracuse University I studied Physics, which was great. Doesn't mix great with partying, but it turned out okay.

Halfway through this grad school experience, I was invited to a summer reunion of my friends. We were going to go off to a cabin and hang out for a whole weekend. This is something I think we've all come to understand at this point.

At the time of this story, I am late to the summer reunion. I'm a day late, because I have spent all night doing coke and partying with the Architecture kids and climbing academic buildings. So, I'm on about two hours of couch sleep and I'm driving down Highway 81 in my recently deceased 1999 Subaru Outback Sport. If anyone wants to buy it, this is not a joke. I need to get rid of this car.

I get a text message as I'm driving down the road. I get a message that says, "Hey, can you pick up some bee killer stuff? Max is allergic to bees and there's a wasp nest here. And there's no EpiPen.”

So, I'm like, "No problem." I stop, I pick up some bee stuff. Handled.

And I get another text that says, "Hurry up. We're waiting for you to do the acid."

Sure. Fine. I can just drive faster. So, I use my foot harder and I drive faster. I'm going through the Catskill Mountains.

This is not a story of a car crash. I arrived perfectly fine at this reunion and I immediately start to make just vivid memories. I see my friends Pedro and Mike and Peter floating in the lake. I see this rolling green lawn going up to this porch where the rest of our friends are. It's like the sun is shining down on us on this beautiful, blue sky summer day. Amazing.

So, we hug and we all say hi and then we do acid. I did a half a tab of acid. For the people who haven't done acid, who don't do this, that means that I will be in control of myself. I'm not going to lose touch with reality, but I am going to rediscover the world around me as though an infant. Maybe kind of smarter than an infant, but still.

And so we do that. We have this really beautiful day, frolicking and we're floating in a lake. We're exploring, doing all these different things. At some point, I think I emailed my advisors, which I don't know why I did that, but I look back and it was actually like a pretty good email that I wrote.

I buried the hatchet with a friend who had wronged me. We reconciled. That was a beautiful thing. A friend of mine, let's call him Tree, in contrast, was laying face down on the ground, staring into the earth. We could tell. His eyes were open. Apparently, he could see through in ways that none of us could, because Tree had done too much acid.

But this day, it runs its course. We have our fun. The acid wears off. We go inside and we find that our friend Laura has been slow cooking pulled pork all day. Amazing. So, I sit down and I grab a sandwich. I have my first bite of food in 20 hours and I immediately start to feel pain. I feel heartburn.

I do a trick that usually works. I hold my breath. Sometimes I can short circuit the heartburn and get by it by holding my breath for a second. This doesn't work. It's getting worse.

I remember that somebody had told me that Gas X helps with heartburn, so I run upstairs. I grab a Gas X. I chew it up. I try to swallow it. It doesn't really go down all the way. It just kind of turns into a chalky mess. And the heartburn is getting worse.

So, I run into the bathroom. I try to drink water. I get a little bit of water down. It helps a little bit. I try to vomit. I can't vomit. I try harder. I vomit and a piece of meat, a ball, a chunk of meat comes out of me and lands in the toilet. For somebody who's never seen a human organ in real life before, I wondered for a second if I had just thrown up my heart out of my mouth.

So, I waited, you know, one Mississippi, two Mississippi… Okay, I think I would know things would be getting like really bad right now.

But things aren't getting better, though. They're continually getting worse. Now, I try to drink water and there isn't room for the water to go down. There isn't air. There's not room for air to go down anymore.

And in the moments that I can't breathe, a few thoughts go through my head. I was born with allergies. I'm allergic to nuts and fish, and my allergy to nuts is considered severe. I've been told since I was a kid that I might eat nuts, have an allergic reaction that is severe and my throat would close up, it's happening now, and I would die.

I thought after 25 years of living and having made some mistakes eating nuts that this was not an experience I was going to have, but I realized in that moment that my living body would not leave that bathroom.

All of a sudden, a lot of things in my life just became very clear. I could see the future of my life that wouldn't happen, the book I'd never write that nobody would read, the research papers I'd never finish. I wondered what my parents would think. I wondered what anybody would think. Would people say, “Oh, of course, they died. They struggled with drugs and alcohol.” It didn't feel like I had struggled with drugs and alcohol, but maybe it never does when it's happening.

I then had another thought. I remembered a time when I was in the third grade and I accidentally shot an EpiPen through my thumb. It turns out, EpiPens are actually just liquid adrenaline. That's what actually saves your life from an allergic reaction. That epinephrine, that adrenaline got into me and I ended up running around the school, bouncing off the walls for like an hour, which was actually really fun.

But I realized that adrenaline is what I need and I thought, "Maybe I should panic." It seems obvious in hindsight, but, “Maybe I should panic. If nothing else, I'm not gonna die in this bathroom and I'm not gonna die alone.”

So, I run out of the bathroom. I'm screaming. I'm flailing my arms. I'm failing to make sound because, you know, air, but I managed to catch the attention of my friend, Peter, who follows me out onto the front lawn. He smokes a cigarette and watches me rolling and flailing and doing somersaults and panicking. Apparently, this isn't that out of character for me, so he wasn't that concerned.

But I started to breathe. It worked. And you already knew that this was going to happen. I mean, I'm here.

But Peter finally asked me, "Are you okay? What's going on?"

I don't really know that I'm out of the woods yet. I'm thinking, "Okay, I'm about to eke out some words right now. My throat's still not well." And I'm thinking, "Well, what if these are my last words?" So, I look at Peter and I'm like, “I love you, Peter.”

So, what happened here? Some people here might be having an idea in their head, “Oh, were you still just on acid?” It turns out that I'm allergic to pork. I had not known this, but it explained over the past year a number of episodes that I had been having every time I ate pork, which I don't eat that much of so it took a little while to figure out.

But that wasn't the biggest realization of that weekend. At the end of the weekend, my friend, Alex, used one of the first selfie sticks to take a group photo of everybody and, very symbolically, I was actually in the bathroom during this photo, so I'm not in it. And my friends, who are very kind people, joked that that meant that I would die before the next reunion, which of course I didn't. I will never die.

But what it meant to me was something else, which is that I am kind of an outsider even within that community. I love those people. Absolutely wonderful and still close with them, but I've never been a bro, really. It's always been a costume. I've never even actually been a boy. Being an outsider amongst them, I realized, was a crutch. It was, in a way, a shot of adrenaline at a time when I really needed it.

But following that, I realized that I didn't need that anymore. It's given me the room to grow to be more of who I am.

Thank you.

Part 2

I've always been kind of fat my whole life. It's been different at times. I've been heavier, I've been thinner, but the long or the short of the story is that I've always kind of been fat.

I'm okay with it now. And this is a story about that.

When I was 22, I worked at a crystal store. The crystal store had a plethora of books. And I was quite the spiritual adventurist. I liked reading books about spiritual adventure because I felt like those books told me things about the world that I had never experienced and that I had a deep desire to experience.

I liked reading books about mushrooms. And the people who came through our store were very unique. They liked mushrooms. They liked Burning Man. They liked going to festivals. They liked all of these adventure-y things. I had never done any of it having a sheltered life, having low experiences, coming from a poor family.

Dust Cwaine shares their story at Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, BC in October, 2022. Photo by Rob Shaer.

I remember one summer, I told my friend Heather that I wanted to do mushrooms. I had been reading Terence McKenna and Terence McKenna was speaking about the hero's dose of psilocybin, which is five grams. Where you go in, you find a part of yourself, you reclaim it, you come back, whatever the story is for whoever's taking them.

I was fascinated by this. So, Heather and I went out camping and I took five grams of mushrooms, and I felt nothing. Nothing. A little bit of wow with the fire and the flames, but, ultimately, not this like epic journey of reclamation.

So, I said to Heather, I said, “There was a part in the book where Terence says that you could take 16 grams of mushrooms and it's like going to psychotherapy for four years." And I said, "If five grams didn't do much, why don't we go have another trip in a couple of months and we take 16 grams each and just go for it?"

And she said, "Well, I've never taken 16 grams of mushrooms before. The most I've taken is maybe about eight and it was at Shambhala."

I was like, "Okay, well, are you down?"

And she said, "Yes." And I love that. I love that Heather was down for the craziness. Having been someone who had gone to Shambhala and who had spent a lot of time in those communities, I thought, "I think she's up for the task." I trust her because she's taken mushrooms, but I never factored in what could possibly happen when you take 16 grams of mushrooms.

We proceeded to go to our little camping spot out in Treaty Seven territory in Mohkinstsis, just outside of Calgary in Kananaskis, and it was just about first frost. I would say we were just past it or just upon it. We parked her camper van on this beautiful little semi circle campsite so that we had privacy on one side and the road on the other and she got to brewing.

We batched out the mushrooms, 16 grams in one pot and 16 grams in another. And just before she put the hot water on, she said, "I'm gonna take a little less." I should have known I had the opportunity to take less, but I had my mind set on the 16 grams. I wanted this experience. I wanted to feel what it felt like for those people that I was reading about in these books. I wanted the chaos. I wanted it so, so bad.

So, I said, "Go ahead. Let's do the 16 grams." She brewed up the tea, separate pots so that the dosing is accurate. For those of you who can't— you got to make sure you dose it properly. You don't share a pot of mushroom tea. That just results in one person being ridiculously high and everybody else not so much.

So, we take our little cups of tea and we head down to the lake. We're sitting there and I drink my tea and I'm like, “Okay, five grams did nothing. Here comes 16 grams. Let's see what happens.”

I'm sitting there and I'm like, “I don't think anything's happening.”

It starts to lightly drizzle and, as the water falls on the water, all of a sudden, I see concentric circles coming out of all the circles from the water droplets. And, all of a sudden, I can see the flower of life in the water. Everything is alive around me and that's when I'm like, “Here we go. We should probably go back to the campsite because it's about to get very real.”

We proceed to take numerous hours to get back to the campsite. Could not tell you, but on our little journey, we saw mushrooms of all shapes and sizes. I saw mushrooms as big as me, as tiny, but they were everywhere. Everywhere. It seemed like there weren't even any trees around us. It was just mushrooms. It was the wildest experience.

And I'd read about that in Terence McKenna's book that when you take mushrooms, you interact with mushrooms and you see them in different dimensions. Things evolve and reveal themselves to you.

So, I was enjoying this but I was also completely gooned. Out of my mind. Absolutely on some other plane of existence.

We got to one part of the path where we were just about to our campsite and I had this epiphany. It was clear as day. And it was that shoes are the enemy. So I proceeded to take my shoes off and throw them into the forest, proclaiming myself free. I was free from these rubber soles that were keeping me from connecting me to my true home, to my true being.

I don't know if you've ever been to Calgary area at first frost, but that's no joke. The ground is cold. The air is dry and cold. It was rainy. My feet proceeded to get really, really cold. And so Heather, who was on a lower dose of mushrooms than me, took me to the camper van, put my feet in a bucket, proceeded to warm up water and proceeded to dump hot water on my icy cold feet, which I don't know if you've experienced that before but it feels like your entire soul is being torn apart by the fire of a thousand suns. It's excruciatingly painful.

Then add onto that, that I am 16 grams of mushrooms deep, alone in the woods with Heather, who is also X amount of grams deep, having to take care of me.

As I'm sitting in the camper van, I'm looking out the door and I see in the forest a light. I can tell that it is a human shape and it's walking through the woods. As it got closer, I could make out that it was a human shape and it was glowing. It looked like a person just backlit. They didn't walk beyond the forest area of our campsite. They stopped at the trees and they ushered me over. Ushered is like beckoning to me to come to them.

And I was like, “Cool, great. Well, we're here, so let's go.” I just walked to the edge of the forest. I remember the being putting its hand on my shoulder, looking at me in the eyes and saying, “This thing in your abdomen needs to be removed. It's not doing you any good. I want to relieve you of this.”

I look down and right out of my stomach was a spear and it was glowing. It was glowing bright yellow. I remember I said, “Okay. Why not?”

And I remember the spirit grabbing the spear and just pulling it out, just smooth. I remember collapsing to my knees screaming. I felt the most intense release. I felt everything fall apart and fall back together. If you've ever been on mushrooms, you know that feeling.

I remember not being able to lift my head and being in such an excruciating amount of pain and looking at the ground. It was dark and I could see the light of this being drifting away until it was just dark.

Then I felt Heather's hand on my shoulder and she's like, “Are you okay?”

I was like, “Yeah. Did you see that? Like that person just pulled the spear out of my abdomen. It was fucking wild.”

She was like, “No. I didn't see that.” She said, “I saw you standing at the edge of the woods and I saw you collapse.”

I was like, “Okay. Wow, that's pretty intense.”

And she's like, “Yeah, very intense.”

She proceeded to put me to bed and proceeded to take care of me for the next couple of days as the mushrooms worked their way out of my system.

When I reflected on that spiritual experience afterwards, and specifically bringing the story to life for Story Collider, I realized a lot of my life after that point was significantly different. I realized that this is the part of my body that I was the most insecure about my entire life. I realized that this is also the part of my body that is the center of my power, my confidence. And when that spear was removed it, reversed and/or cleared something in me that allowed me to move forward and be okay with the body that I was given. Be okay with it.

I'm celebrated for body positivity now. It's something that I put forward because I believe that we need to accept and be where we are in the body that we're given, whether it's fat, whether it's thin. I'm really grateful to whatever that spirit was, whether it was a movie playing out in my head or whether it was a real thing, but I have never taken more than a gram of mushrooms since.

It's been 10 years, but I do microdose every day. I like to just have a little bit of psilocybin with me at all times. Even if I'm not taking it, I like having it with me because I like having the spirit around. And I'm so grateful for mushrooms for showing me my personal power.