The first hallucination arrived shortly after Peggy Van de Plassche finished her serving of dried psilocybin mushrooms, pulled down her eye mask, and laid back on a Japanese-style futon. “I saw a man standing above me,” she recalled. “He was a shaman and he was pulling snakes and rats from all over my body.”
Van de Plassche, a former banker and venture capital investor, was at a luxury resort in British Columbia’s Okanagan region where she was experimenting with a large dose of psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. Although it was her inaugural “journey”—as wellness gurus call mushroom trips—the symbolism behind the vision was immediately clear to her: “It was all the self-hatred and self-loathing I have for myself.”
