It is interesting how the hallucinations consistently represent tiny people/elves to the mushroom consumer, even across geography/culture.
I wonder what the brain is doing…
I wonder what the brain is doing…
And spook work for His Jolliness' Secret Service, to keep their Naughty and Nice databases current.
It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...
The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks?
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
So not everyone is seeing elves is my point here.