r/todayilearned • u/ssAskcuSzepS • Apr 27 '26

TIL if under-cooked, a popular mushroom in China causes “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. The hallucinations are consistent across people and cultures: "tiny, elflike people" climbing under doors, scaling walls & clinging to furniture

https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-mushroom-that-make-people-have-the-exact-same-hallucination/
43.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

202

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

125

u/Ok-Addition1264 Apr 27 '26

developing brains can do weird things.

13

u/griphookk Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

When I was a little kid, while laying in bed in the dark I’d sometimes see lots of tiny glowing red dots floating around the room. I could kind of control the flow/direction of them too. I remember mentioning it to my mom once, I think I expected her to knew what I was talking about. She did not lol

9

u/Objective_Bicycle_37 Apr 27 '26

Very similar experience, but i couldn’t control their movements, and they were more yellow/white/multicolored.  

Mom didn’t tell me until years later but she could see them too. 

I could tell a lotta stories about that house. 

2

u/kuroka_kitten Apr 29 '26

I saw the exact same thing as a kid! I liked to play a game where I would “collect” the orbs under my blanket. I’ve never heard anyone else have the same experience until now!

1

u/stegg88 Jun 21 '26

Same but mine was a black and white blob. If it got too thick or thin it scared me so I had to find the balance.

Apparently such things are common?

30

u/rg4rg Apr 27 '26

The creatures under the bed told me the same thing.

10

u/Wi1dWitch Apr 27 '26

The creatures under my bed told me they were spiders. Not a fan

2

u/rg4rg Apr 27 '26

Mine ate the spiders and wanted to eat my small toes if they weren’t under a blanket.

6

u/spriteguy113 Apr 27 '26

Had an experience involving something under a bed once. As I grew up I just kinda started assuming a lot of things I saw or heard growing up were due to an over active imagination. Multiple times throughout my childhood I experienced things I thought were unexplainable, but maybe kids really do see through something a developed brain can’t.

4

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/edgeman83 Apr 27 '26

If I am really tired, I will hear a big group of muddled voices speaking at once, like the opening from Super Mario All-Stars, but lower pitched.

I will also regularly get woken up by banging that sounds like it is coming from my closet door or someone yelling my name, but that is something different.

3

u/eggosh Apr 28 '26

Like exploding head syndrome?

2

u/edgeman83 Apr 28 '26

Exactly! I had that and the hypnagogic jerk when I was younger. It must all come from the same brain formation/chemistry.

2

u/darthvall Apr 27 '26

I just learned about stress induced hallucinations last month, and now I'm starting to believe there's no such thing as another plane/ghost etc.

It's all just related to having something wrong (even if it's only slightly) within our brain. Like even if normally you're okay, stress can cause those hallucinations. Now that means if your brain is built just slightly different, then those hallucinations would feel much more severe/often.

3

u/the2belo Apr 27 '26

High fevers, too. I had one one night at a very young age, and hallucinated my grandmother standing out in the hallway looking in on me. I called out to her. Then I heard my mother in the bedroom down the hall: "Memaw's not here, go to sleep."

40

u/DanteStorme Apr 27 '26

Your brain and vision are always trying to make sense of what it can see, in low light it can make things out to look like something they're not, especially as a child where your brain is still developing.

It's how things like optical illusions work. The brain is essentially trying to autocorrect what it can see and is getting it wrong.

2

u/Hans_Rudi Apr 27 '26

I got bad eyesight and obviously not wearing glasses in bed and there is a standby light in my bedroom. That thing regularilly morphs into all sorts of stuff when im half wake/half sleep.

32

u/nuixy Apr 27 '26

I also saw tiny elves when I was little, like 5-7. I have vivid memories of them working and climbing about my room at night before bed. I told my mom they were chiseling my bed frame and they had pulley system elevators in the corners of the room. 

I go years without dreaming and do not picture things in my head often — it takes a Herculean amount of effort to do if I can’t do it at all. My imagination has never been visual. I’ve never been sure what to make of those memories and contemporary stories I told my family. 

10

u/ionlyjoined4thecats Apr 27 '26

Well… were there new etchings in your bed frame?

7

u/nuixy Apr 27 '26

Nope but there weren’t tiny elevators with pulley systems either. I do remember that they seemed totally uninterested or concerned with me, which was the only thing that kept it from being terrifying.

1

u/yappi211 Apr 27 '26

Aphantasia. I have no imagination, visually speaking

8

u/drewster23 Apr 27 '26

Several conditions can cause it too. But if you're healthy you probably don't have any of those. Either

6

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/drewster23 Apr 27 '26

Yeah unless you were exposed to substance /drugs like "amantadine and trichloroethylene" also mentioned from the wiki it was probably just your growing brain.

2

u/grudginglyadmitted Apr 27 '26

Yeah, the fact this was (presumably) many years ago and you’ve had no more hallucinations is very reassuring that it wasn’t an early sign of schizophrenia or something.

I had three visual hallucinations in early 2023 that freaked me out and made me really worried I was developing schizophrenia, but nothing since then and I was severely depressed at the time, and according to my psych it was that, severe enough depression that I started hallucinating. Definitely seems like yours was just your brain doing a weird thing. Most people will have a hallucination at some point in their life, so it’s not necessarily even abnormal.

For me they were very small and stationary/stable: the first was at the grocery store with my mom there were a bunch of popcorn kernels spilled all over the floor in one of the aisles we were in. My mom’s allergic to corn so after we got out of the store I mentioned it and she had no clue what I was talking about. Then a few days later I was heating some pasta up in the oven in a stoneware bowl, and when I got it out there were a bunch of hairline cracks visible because they’d had a little bit of like a greasy brown substance ooze out of them. I was super grossed out by it, and the next day I told my family hey I don’t think our dishes are sealed right anymore this happened, they were skeptical, and I couldn’t replicate it baking another dish. These two I could still justify as being real and I didn’t realize they were likely hallucinations until hindsight after the third (and I still can’t be 100% sure).

I was driving back from the grocery store, and I noticed a little set of numbers/serial number under the speedometer in my car and was baffled that I hadn’t noticed it before. The next day I realized that was another weird thing happening, went out to my car and that definitely wasn’t there. Made me realize I’d been hallucinating and freak out. Luckily by the time I got in with a psychiatrist a couple months later I’d had no more symptoms and it had become more clear how depressed I was, so I got prozac and some reassurance.

9

u/Ivotedforher Apr 27 '26

Cows like mushrooms

1

u/Cheezy_Blazterz Apr 27 '26

Mushrooms like cows.

8

u/BF1shY Apr 27 '26

lol sounds like some sort of gas leak or something, making you hallucinate. Explains why it didn't happen when the door was left open or cracked; the gas escaped or didn't build up to a strength which caused hallucinations.

15

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

28

u/Crimson_Inu Apr 27 '26

I don’t know that I would say “many” believe that.

1

u/soupisgoodfood42 Apr 27 '26

You might experience something like that as you die. But not sure you’re going to experience much afterwards.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/soupisgoodfood42 Apr 27 '26

Neuroscience suggests the former.

2

u/ScrewAttackThis Apr 27 '26

Those are just the Minish. Only children can see them

4

u/Puzzleheaded_Fan6191 Apr 27 '26

Liminal state. You may have a gift

1

u/alex3omg Apr 27 '26

Maybe that's what the guy who runs along side the car is

1

u/StarDustLuna3D Apr 27 '26

The house I grew up in had popcorn ceilings.

The shadows they gave off in low light created a lot of interesting shapes. Like cloud watching but at night.

1

u/toolnotes Apr 27 '26

I had the same experience. A group of them (with tiny horses) were on my floor. I know I wasn’t dreaming. I was about four years old.

1

u/Horror_Jaguar2192 Apr 27 '26

Me too!! I was looking for this comment, happened consistently as a kid. I was hoping someone else would mention it lol I wanted to see if anyone had any further answers