What is the Amanita Muscaria Mushroom?
Amanita muscaria (AKA the Fly Agaric) is a species of fungi that can be found in temperate forests all over the world.
This shroom is classified as a psychedelic — but it’s not exactly psychedelic — not in the conventional context at least. Users experience changes in sensory perception, but not like any other hallucinogen on Earth. Hallucinations from this mushroom are best described as lucid — objects appear distorted, and it becomes difficult to assess the true size of both the self and external objects.
It’s very difficult to achieve a serious visionary experience at all. You need to take high doses for it to be truly hallucinogenic, but these doses also bring a lot of uncomfortable, potentially dangerous side effects.
This mushroom is more of an oneirogen than a proper psychedelic.
An oneirogen is a substance that induces or enhances dreamlike states of consciousness.
Most people fall asleep a few hours after taking fly agaric, which is when the real effects of this mushroom show their true colors — injecting you into a world of bizarre dreamscapes. The dreams this species of fungi induce are so deeply strange and chaotic it’s virtually impossible to make sense of or share the experience in words once it’s over.
Because of the unpredictable nature of this psychedelic and the high risk of side effects, we don’t recommend anybody take this mushroom for its psychedelic effects. Most people who take this mushroom don’t take it again. The experience isn’t particularly insightful or enjoyable and can even be quite scary.
Most people who use this mushroom “regularly” (that is, more than once) take light doses or microdoses for the sake of promoting more vivid dreams. It works very well for this — almost too well.
The dreams induced from this mushroom are hard to make sense of and are rarely considered “visionary” because of how chaotic and random they are.
How to Prepare Fly Agaric
While I’ve said this before — I urge you against eating this mushroom at any doses higher than 1 gram (a microdose).
With that said, here’s how to prepare this mushroom for both food and as a psychedelic.
The process of preparing this mushroom involves exposing the mushrooms to conditions that promote as much of the toxic ibotenic acid to convert to muscimol as possible. This involves drying and gently heating the mushrooms with an acid such as vinegar or lemon juice.
Most people will then make the mushroom into a tincture by gently heating it with alcohol.
Here’s a method outlined by Psyched Substances from a video posted back in 2016:
What You’ll Need:
- Red wine (1 L)
- Dried Amanita muscaria (60 grams)
- Sliced apple (½ an apple)
- Nutmeg (a pinch)
- Apple cider vinegar (15 mL)
- Cinnamon sticks (3 sticks)
Step 1: Mix All The Ingredients Together & Cook On Low Heat
Add all the ingredients and bring them up to temperature. You don’t want it to boil, but you want to see some movement in the fluid as it heats up.
Leave it on low heat for about 3 hours, stirring frequently.
Step 2: Cool & Strain The Liquid
After 3 hours, turn off the heat and let the mixture cool.
Strain it with a strainer, tea filter, or cheesecloth and pour the liquid into a dark glass container.
Potency & Dose
This mixture will boil down by about 25% by the time it’s finished, but it’s important to measure the final volume when you’re done in case you get something different. The final volume of the fluid is going to affect the dose.
To find the potency of this concoction, divide the amount of mushroom you started with (60 grams) by the final volume (in mL).
If you finished with 750 mL of liquid, the potency would be equivalent to 0.08 grams (80 mg) per mL of fluid. Psyched Substances took the equivalent dose of around 15-20 grams of dried mushrooms for his experiment (about 200 mL of the tincture).
Alternative Method: Sun Tea
A simpler (but less efficient) method is to make sun tea.
To do this, simply fill a jar with dried Amanita muscaria along with some water and a bit of vinegar or lemon juice. Seal it up and leave it in the sun for the day.
At the end of the day, it can be consumed.
(tripsitter)