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by Rodeoclash 1005 days ago
Funny how this story has entered the folk lore around LSD. I remember hearing some version of it in the early 2000s in New Zealand.

The other one was the story of a guy who had taken so much LSD he thought he'd turned into a glass of orange juice. Couldn't lie down or he'd spill, couldn't go outside or he would evaporate. I wonder if it has any basis from a real story.

3 comments

I don't know about the orange juice guy, but I can tell you personally that I smoked salvia a decade ago and turned into a shopping mall / department store.

I lost my internal monologue, and found my universe replaced with an infinite, bright wide void. I slowly made out vaguely shadowy humanoid forms, and massive, infinitely tall monolithic structures arranged in rows.

As I studied them I realized it was people walking through aisles. I heard some vague noise slowly rising in volume but couldn't understand it. As I looked through these "aisles", I noticed aisle signs hanging above them. The words on these signs turned out to be sets of words which fractally related to some "essence" of a thought I was having.

For each parallel thought I was experiencing, I could see an aisle containing these semantic markers which broke the thoughts down into individual words representing some aspect of the thought. This went on as far as I could see. There was again no accompanying inner monologue like there normally would be, these thoughts were felt and understood silently through these semantic markers, experienced as I read them.

The noise became loud enough and I realized it was a woman over a PA system describing my thoughts. My inner monologue had dissolved and re-emerged as a disembodied voice which told me what I was thinking and seeing and feeling at the moment I felt it, or even before. Every thought I had was not my own, but instead I found myself a passive observer to a physical space representing my mind. Complete ego death.

It was quite meta, as I listened to her first describe my experience of being confused and then slowly understanding what I was seeing. At a point of inflection, she began describing the experience of me listening to her describe me listening to her, and how it made me feel. It's hard to describe what this felt like.

This lasted for what seemed like a very, very long time. The experience was enough for me to never touch the stuff again. The memory is viscerally burned into my head and will never leave.

> I wonder if it has any basis from a real story.

There's something of the glass delusion about it (eg my legs are made of glass and will shatter if I move, or I swallowed a glass piano as a child and if it shatters it will puncture my organs). The similarities in the thought processes suggest it could be real.

this is a common folk story around the world. other variations are that he thought he was an orange. or he put a sheet of lsd under his clothes and absorbed them by sweating while running from police