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- Hacker News
- Most of weird European and Middle Eastern legends and fairy tales originate from drugs or encountering real artifacts or phenomenons which they couldn't explain. Look up how cyclops appeared in mythology.by undebuggable
- which could imply that gnome outfits and elf garb originated from people seeing them and then drawing itby luxuryballs
- In case you're wondering like me, I think parent is referring to elephant skulls being mistaken for one-eyed, giant creatures.by ghgr
- Half of the plot of Common Side Effects :)by vsviridov
- Absolutely brilliant show. Highly recommend it to anyone. Feels like a hyper condensed version of the X-files but with a decent sense of humour to it as well.
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
by ColdStream - I think this is so fascinating because the hallucinations sound unlike anything else produced by psychedelics and other psychoactive substances, so I really look forward to learning what the mechanism is.
From the stories I've read it also doesn't sound people are experiencing outright delirium although the experience can probably be pretty stressful if you don't know what is happening.
- Do we understand the mechanism behind any hallucinations?by farfatched
- its a hot online topic when talking about YunNan province of china.its a land of all kinds of mushrooms/(and bugs). If you eat mushroom hotpot in there, the waiter will lock the pot and put a timer on the table, before the time limit hit, you cannot open and eat..cooks long time helps reduce the chance of position.
this tv show ( meet youself, cast by Liu yifei, who also played Mulan(2020)) has a short part is about the 'tiny people': https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww
by yanhangyhy - > all kinds of mushrooms/(and bugs)
And cannabis. It's hippy heaven.
- Paper in Mycologia https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00275514.2026.2...by wglb
- > One person told me that while they were eating soup, the little people were jumping off their spoon into the bowl and swimming around. As they scooped a bite, the little people remained in their mouth.
There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
by dash2 - I’m pretty sure The Borrowers already did this one.by conception
- Or a Disney animation.by cubefox
- I bet there is some mushroom species in Europe as well that contains that substance. All those stories about dwarfs, trolls etc. and especially in woody area's, they must have come from somewhere.by misja111
- Since dwarfs (little people) actually exist, I don't think we need to reach into psychedelics for an explanation.by dbspin
- Folklore’s roots go deeper than a single species.
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
by Jolter - There's some variety of little people myth in most cultures. There's also giant myths in most and there's no mushroom for that.
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
by trencedamp - Not sure about the exact same active substance, but Amanita muscaria is the obvious candidate. It's also commonly shown as part of the imagery in stories involving tiny people: the Smurfs, Super Mario (it's the power-up that makes Mario bigger/smaller), Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on.by aflinik
- Those who have used DMT often talk about machine elves. I imagine there is a part of the brain that specifically recognizes humanoid figures even in the distance that is getting overstimulated.by adzm
- your eyes are usually closed during DMT trip so I don't think your hypothesis stands.by wraptile
- Assuming your model of reality is materialist and all of reality is created by grey matter, then yes.by colordrops
- I've read about someone "exploring" the DMT realm with the machine elves by putting a hundred or so willing participants into that state and they found that multiple participants encountered the same machine elf, so there's more going on than just that.
Also, machine elves are not all humanoid. Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse. It was very fascinating to read about this phenomenon. I remember that what people described felt like some kind of Internet that is accesses with your consciousness.
by OroPla - Remember when stable diffusion would create image soups full of horrifying humanoid faces and figures? I imagine something similar happens when you dull the brain in the right way.by TonyStr
- This is obviously just anecdotal, but when I was 6 I got very ill with the flu and was in bed for days. Super high fever and was quite out of it.
I had a, idk, spell one afternoon where I saw this quilt we had on the wall open up at all the squares, and thousands of tiny people/elves poured out. They marched around carrying little boxes and were all around me.
I remember it so vividly more than 30 years later because it freaked me out so much. Tried telling my parents about it and they just dismissed it as a nightmare, but I swear I was awake, just out of it with fever.
Anyways, it was early 90's, and I know I was close to the dangerous temperatures of high fever. Perhaps the brain does interesting hallucinations in these situations?
Have never hallucinated or had anything like that happen since.
by birdsongs - These are pretty famous mushrooms in China. Right now Yunnan mushroom hot pot is all the rage, basically in every city in the country. It's also led to lots of tourists in Yunnan wandering around foraging for wild mushrooms. The problem is that there's hundreds of different types of mushrooms with varying levels of toxicity, and unless you grew up in the area and know what you're doing it's easy to get mixed up. There's plenty of videos on chinese social media of people giggling in hospital beds geeked out their gourds pointing at little people.by dluan
- Link? (To any of the above.)by farfatched
- I tried to find the psilocybin ones with friends once, just kids (well we were 15) with a few books about mushrooms from the library haha. We grabbed anything that "kinda looked like them", then put them all on the kitchen counter, tried to divide them into piles of the same things and find out what is what... but things just became less clear instead of obvious.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
by customguy - Whenever I hear these stories about multiple cultures having the same hallucination, I think that we have to give some weight to the possibility that the little people are real and the mushrooms just let us see them.by jsw97
- There are some thinkers (IMHO) who do think it's real possibility. These thinkers are well aware of hallucinations and have accounted for it.
- something something machine elves...by eqmvii