A mushroom that makes people have the exact same hallucination
vice.com
vice.com
This is a fundamental difference between psychedelics such as psilocybin and deliriants like datura. Usually, with psychedelics, you know that what you are seeing is not real, or at least, that it is not normal. With deliriants, even if you know exactly what you took and the effect it has, the crazy things you are seeing feel real and perfectly normal until the effect wears off.
What make me feel goes to the psychedelic side is that description talk about something wonderful, or at least worthy of attention. If it was a hallucination in its purest sense, the presence of little people would be no weirder than that of a cat or a dog.
But the fact that it is generally considered unpleasant and not used for recreational or spiritual purposes is more of a deliriant thing.
That is quite characteristically distinct to the “endogenous” appearance of other figures when using serotonergics, that almost certainly arise from intra CNS activity
Extreme tangent but interesting (to me): people in different cultures experience voice hallucinations differently. In the west, "hearing voices" is often frightening because the voices are hostile. In other cultures, the voices are friendly!
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
You mean like, religion?
>What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.
My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.
Really, DMT trips kinda go like an acid trip but you've taken 100x times the dose and died in the process. Reality itself kind of dissolves away and you forget what you are frequently.
In that state, there's a lot going on, with a fair bit of synesthesia and trying to decipher exactly what's happening. Things breath in and out rapidly, but it feels like lifetimes.
Anyway, the "machine elves" aren't really elves... Or machines. Even on sub-breakthrough doses, you start seeing eyes and mouths in the spaces around you, you may even hear voices/singing - IME often a beckoning. Once you break through, those hallucinations have been ramped up and your brain is filling in so many gaps (at this point your eyes will have closed) they come across almost like deities that exist in between time and space. They don't have consistent forms; they speak in tongues / songs that you can sometimes "understand". They tend to be "neutral / neutral", so to speak.
It's profoundly difficult to explain, since language wasn't really designed to capture that state of mind and lacks the adjectives. But someone tried to make something relatable with "machine elves" at some point and it stuck because "yeah, that's weird enough to capture the essence of it".
Some people do take these experiences as more than what they are, though, and act like machine elves are "real" lore or that they are something that actually exists "beyond the veil" or whatever. And now that so many people learn about it well before tripping, they may be seeing more concretely "machine elves". But that's way more... Pedestrian(?) than what I experienced without that bias.
It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.
More info about what metabolites may be involved.
I sent the Vice article to my girlfriend and she had a good question and wondered if the mice treated with it see even smaller little mice.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-imagining-it/
Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...
You’re doing fine, they’re just busting your balls, ha
As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.
And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).
I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.
I think the "little people" in the article are more fairy sized or smaller. The BBC article linked to at that article says they were seen on dishes.
This isn't as helpful a unit of measure as you imagined when you wrote that, fyi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Machine_elves
These reports were the first I ever heard of different people having a common experience during use of a psychedelic.
The reports of little people resulting from consumption of Lanmaoa asiatica mushrooms seem similar.
Just one web search result on the DMT "machine elf" subject:
https://www.iflscience.com/why-do-people-see-elves-and-other...
This is a surprisingly common research failure mode. Actually talking to people is important.
> Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and lab studies showed that extracts cause dramatic behavioral changes in mice
Presumably, causing them to see little mice.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lilliputian-Hallucinat...
I call those the... "Little Shrooms People".
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People#/media/...
Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.
I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.
NOT YET
I guess you could call it something like, "system-limited emergence," in the sense that different systems can have similar outputs if they are structured the same way.
In other words, the idea is that differing groups of people don't see elves because they are all accessing some hidden reality full of elves, but rather because the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location.
This maybe seems obvious for mushrooms or other substances, but I think the same concept applies to other phenomena too: the spread of ideas, political actions, etc. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.
So these mushrooms change the mind in a very specific way, but no more strange than putting on red tinted glasses.
Speaking as someone who has involuntary hallucinations, this is a reality taken for granted by most people. I have very different hallucinations when I am dep[ressed vs when I am manic. And you are on the right track in my opinion that "the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location."
I'd be a little surprised if anyone still makes a TV with an analog tuner.