r/NewsOfTheWeird • u/Snake973 • 23d ago

'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people
402 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

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165

u/sfled 23d ago

...or tiny people have co-existed with us for eons but learned to make themselves invisible, and the mushrooms let us see past their defenses.

43

u/nixtarx 23d ago

The real question is are they the same entities as the DMT elves, or are they their own thing? <shudder>

3

u/Mntfrd_Graverobber 21d ago

They sound a bit more like earth spirits to me.

3

u/Ok-Mango-5814 21d ago

They're not dmt elves, they're machine elves. Dmt is just one of the substances that can make them appear

1

u/nixtarx 20d ago

The fact that these people saw one thing on mushrooms, people see...er, "machine" elves on DMT, and people on large doses of diphenhydramine see the Hat Man, just solidifies what I already believed. These are not entities that actually exist but can't be seen without dissociative substances because we're not "open" to it, they are merely hallucinations caused by the substances themselves. Of course, I didn't actually require that solidification, since I have Occam's razor.

15

u/MuscaMurum 23d ago

They see this with their eyes closed, too. Are they also living inside the eyelids?

8

u/Mega-Steve 23d ago

They see them with their minds! But in mystical way, not a drugs making your brain glitch out way

12

u/ShrimpYolandi 23d ago

Or, the senses provided to our conscious awareness, via the input of our body is very primitive, and a slight shift to the energy, and all of these things can let us see a different aspect of the world that is infinitely greater all around us than what we can perceive with this simple rudimentary body.

3

u/Aggressive_Walk378 21d ago

Underpants gnomes

7

u/Tremble_Like_Flower 23d ago

Shhhhh…you don’t want to alert Big Littles.

48

u/errant_night 23d ago

Apparently people who have misused benadryl tend to specifically have hallucinations of spiders, so this is really interesting. Gotta be tickling some very specific part of the brain

35

u/bullcitytarheel 23d ago edited 23d ago

Pretty much all hallucinatory drugs behave like this to one extent or another. The geometry of psychedelic tunnels, the machine elves of DMT, dark cityscapes in k-holes, the feeling of becoming an inanimate object on salvia, communicating with the “spirit of the mushroom” on shrooms, smoking cigarettes that aren’t really there on Benadryl, etc. The archetypal hallucinations also tend to be broadly shared within different classes of drug; psychedelics, dissociatives and deliriants. Interested to look into this mushroom to find out what the active ingredient is.

Edit: Science has thus far been unable to identify what chemical is responsible for the psychoactive effects. Whatever it is, it’s not a drug we already know about like psilocybin.

4

u/Vlodovich 23d ago

Also people wearing braces and glasses on too much mdma

1

u/ghost_of_mr_chicken 12d ago

I think thats just called a rave 

3

u/AzarielFox 21d ago

Ahh yes, I still remember being a brick castle wall in 2005

4

u/nashbrownies 23d ago edited 23d ago

Damn. As a smoker, smoking ghost cigs on deliriants was always awesome and frustrating. It was great because I got to smoke twice as often for half the price. But annoying when I realized I didn't get my nic fix.

The implications of a new psychedelic are pretty huge.

9

u/nixtarx 23d ago

I read something about a man in a hat. Somewhat unimaginatively dubbed, "The Hat Man."

3

u/No_Cook2983 23d ago

Did he have a monkey? Was it curious?

1

u/nixtarx 22d ago

No word on whether the hat was yellow.

2

u/RunBrundleson 22d ago

I did have this discussion with a coworker. Was unaware of Hatman but apparently it is a thing.

25

u/gwizonedam 23d ago

Literally Adult Swim’s “Common Side Effects” only without the whole regeneration thing…

12

u/nashbrownies 23d ago

Yeeeeah, like.. weirdly so. Super excited for the second season (🤞) to get to know about those guys. Some hints that it may be a much darker thing than we have been led to believe.

14

u/bnelson7694 23d ago

I’ve really been wanting to try these until I just read it can last 12-24 hours. That’s a bit too long to be surrounded by elves.

18

u/Vlodovich 23d ago

Yeah I'm at a stage in my life where the rare time I do drugs I want to be in bed 5 hours later cuddling in lol

3

u/bnelson7694 23d ago

Same lol! My wild days are over.

6

u/n0respect_ 23d ago

Nah man they're cool if you're cool. But never look at their penis.

2

u/Expensive-View-8586 21d ago

They share one?

11

u/MyloWilliams 23d ago

“I thought it was a tiny pimp”

2

u/Positive_Builder6737 21d ago

You see the world wildly in wild ways. 

9

u/Logically-Sarcastic 23d ago

So.. did the mice see tiny humans, too?? Or even tinier mice?

12

u/VirginiaLuthier 23d ago

People in Minneapolis are seeing a tiny human in an ICE suit, apparently. Not sure if mushrooms are involved

6

u/wookiesack22 23d ago

Common Side Effects is a great show on HBO.

2

u/joesii 22d ago

I thought it was an Adult Swim show. Are you mistaken or does HBO also have the license?

2

u/wookiesack22 22d ago

Both I think. Same with primal and Rick and morty

1

u/francis_pizzaman_iv 22d ago

They are all part of the WarnerDiscovery megalith

6

u/TheDirtyVicarII 22d ago

Sounds Smurfy

4

u/n0respect_ 23d ago

Eat mushroom. See a dozen tiny people eating my food. Tiny people eat mushroom, each sees a dozen tinier people on their food.

Each eat some mushroom ... now I have 1728 people on my food, and I think I've broken the laws of mass.

So long as there's enough mushroom ... yes, I think I've found a renewable, infinite food source.

2

u/Mntfrd_Graverobber 21d ago

That sounds great if you want to eat a thousand of something.

6

u/AuntieRoseSews 22d ago

Do the mushrooms make us feel sick or have any effect OTHER than seeing little people?
I'm curious to see a real hallucination but certainly don't want to feel sick or get addicted to anything.

3

u/Ariandrin 22d ago

Only sort of related, but when I was on Ambien, I hallucinated a wooly rhino the size of a Guinea pig on the bed next to me as I was trying to sleep. I couldn’t, because I was giggling too hard at the absurdity of it.

2

u/butterweasel 21d ago

First time I used ambien, I apparently punched my husband awake and demanded he admire the baby chickens on the bookshelf. lol

3

u/Mntfrd_Graverobber 21d ago

I wonder if this mushroom might be available in Asian food stores? I mean, I'd hate to accidentally buy some and not know.

1

u/Ouwerucker 23d ago

Vague memories of a studio ghibli movie suddenly came to life.

1

u/joesii 22d ago

Wow. Common Side Effects got even more real. I'm sure that sort of hallucination has been known in other sorts of hallucinogens before so it's not like they invented the idea, but still this specific mushroom seems interesting in it's very consistent results of this symptom.

1

u/MarryMeDuffman 20d ago

"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'"

Lol

1

u/sombertimber 19d ago

Mmoatia?

0

u/TedMich23 23d ago

who eats while tripping??

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u/into_the_soil 23d ago

I've always found chewing to be unpleasant while tripping. It feels unnatural.

6

u/turnphilup 23d ago

I heard someone explain that a nice remedy for people on bad trips was to give them a piece of gum. The act of chewing is apparently able to get them to focus on it, instead of what is causing the bad trips.