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Comment by sedatk | Hacker News Reader

How do you even go about proper dosing and frequency of psilocybin use? Just random guess?

Anecdotal but whenever I’ve been asked for this guidance (having been around the block, but not a shaman by any means) I ask about the person’s dreams. Do they usually remember them, how intense are they? More intense = start with lower dose (maybe .5g). Less so maybe start with 1 or 1.5g. Of course this is subjective and relative but a rule of thumb that has worked reasonably well.

For frequency, that depends on a variety of factors I suppose.

I don't plan on ever taking psilocybin- but why dreams?- Asking cause I almost never remember any- unless I wake up at a weird time- or sleep in a weird circumstance.

Is it indicative of anything?- I sleep really well, never had any issues with sleep- and wake up well-rested. Is it better to remember more dreams?- if so what are the benefits and how to go about doing it?

I’d love to have an answer to this! As I said this is anecdotal, based on many years of experiences with friends, and the ones tending to have more vivid dreams seem to have more intense trips given equivalent dosage. It became a bit of a pet theory at some point so I ask about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some confirmation bias or something like that at play, but given the kind of hallucinatory nature of dreams I can also imagine some sort of linked mechanism.

I also rarely remember dreams and despite occasional exceptions wouldn’t consider most of them vivid. So I tend toward heavier dosages :)

You can look at studies done using psylocybin for a start, but also, adjust based on your own experience. Most people use between one and two grams of mushrooms, with two grams being quite strong strong for many people.

Some people are tempted to push the dosage so far as they can take it to experience "ego death", and I don't think that's necessary for therapeutic effects. Not quite sure how safe it is to push the dosage as high as you can either. There's some kind of esoteric belief in some circles that you'll get some magic enlightenment, connecting with another realm if you trip hard enough, but imo that mostly attracts people who already have fragile mental health.

Note that most of the responses you're receiving, while accurate, are in terms of units of dried cubensis mushrooms, not pure psilocybin. A fresh cubensis mushroom weighs about one-tenth its original weight once it's fully dried, and when dried they usually contain about 0.7-1.0% psilocybin by weight. So 2.5 grams of dried mushrooms will contain about 25mg of psilocybin, which is the "25-mg oral dose[] of psilocybin" given in the study under discussion.

A practical approach is to take about 1.25 grams of dried cubensis, wait about an hour to see how you feel, then try another 0.5 grams if you're up for it, and then another 0.5 in half an hour. By that point you'll have ingested enough to notice effects for sure, and you'll have confidence what your personal right dose is.

Beware of tryptamine tolerance: wait 2 weeks between doses to reset your sensitivity.

Each mushroom contains a different amount of psilocybin. You can calibrate a batch by grinding them all up at once in a coffee grinder and trying a sample. (Always be careful taking powdered mushrooms that someone else has ground up, because you don't know whether anything else has been mixed in.)

Also look up "lemon tek" to prevent tummy upset.

Not totally random, but yeah it's kind of a crap shoot. But to be fair it's no different than a lot of other pharmaceuticals where it's just trial and error until you figure out what works for you.

So like pharmaceuticals, you figure out your goals, go with something in the range that works for most people. It doesn't hurt to start very small (0.25g), which some people do every day. There's a lot of variables including strains and even when/what you ate last, where you are in any kind of hormone swing (men have them too), so trial and error is about as best we can get for now (recreationally). This is why I'm really excited by these new pharmaceuticals.

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