The Fabulous World of Hieronymus Bosch — A Tropane Delirium

## Editorial Note > **Documentation — not instruction.** This report describes an extreme and potentially life-threatening self-experiment. It is published here solely for documentary and harm reduction purposes. Specific preparation methods and exact doses have been deliberately omitted. **Any attempt to replicate this experience could be fatal.** If you are in a mental health crisis, please seek professional help immediately. --- ## The Beginning Friday, 10 AM. A tangle of emotions in my chest — relief that the experiment is finally starting, and a quiet unease about what I've walked into alone. No trip sitter. No one had been willing to accompany me on a potentially lethal journey. I begin the day with half an hour of meditation at my home altar. I settle my mind, move through some exercises, eat rice balls — what I suspect may be my last meal for several days. By early afternoon, I've brewed the preparation. The final herbal blend consists of several potent and, in places, acutely toxic plants. I'm deliberately leaving out all quantities. The doses I consumed would be potentially fatal for someone without years of tolerance. > *Please do not consume any of these plants, in any amount. I strongly discourage any attempt to replicate this.* Around 3 PM the brew is ready. I run through my safety preparations: knives moved out of the apartment, lethal substances locked away, paper and pencils scattered through every room, two cameras placed out of sight. Emergency measures are laid out — though without a sober companion, their practical value is close to zero. I wait for sunset. At 5 PM, I begin eating a large dose of psilocybin truffles over the course of half an hour. Afterward I smoke a little and meditate. Dissatisfied with my mood, I put on calm music and drift into a film I know will lift me. After about thirty minutes, the effects begin to arrive. The pleasant warmth grows into a feeling of boundless love and ease. I lie back and look at the ceiling — at a large poster of a young woman in a kimono. She starts to move. First haltingly, then more fluidly. She looks into my eyes, smiles, extends a hand toward me — though the image only shows her from the shoulders up. The room gets more colorful. Every poster begins to breathe. Then a fly catches my eye. I'm certain there are no flies in this apartment. I try to catch it and realize: hallucination. I note it down and remind myself — I'm not here for a pleasant trip. I'm here for a journey into the unknown. --- ## The Shift On the way to the kitchen I stop to stare at the colors and patterns rippling across the walls. The intensity is escalating with every moment. In the kitchen, an impulse rises: increase the dose. The fear of missing something — of the journey being too short — overpowers reason. The key to the locked cabinet is no longer in the apartment. So a different idea surfaces: LSD. What would LSD do to a nightshade trip? I go to my hiding spot. A small syringe of liquid LSD. I deliberate, take a drop. Put it down. Take another. A third. On the fourth time, in a state of excited recklessness, I inject the entire remaining contents into the back of my throat. > *For a moment, the thought surfaced that I had probably gone too far. But my will was stronger.* I speak into the video camera, documenting what I've consumed. Already it's becoming difficult to maintain any coherent grip on what's happening. **From the video recordings — transcribed verbatim:** **Message 1:** *"Memo to myself. Have taken 100g of truffles, four different varieties. Strong visuals, images are moving, bright colors everywhere, patches of color on the walls. Occasional difficulty staying in control. What did I want to say? Think, think — ah yes, right, sorry. Some difficulty staying in control, forgetting things a little."* **Message 2:** *"It is now 6:32 PM, only 20 minutes since onset, but it feels like an eternity."* **Message 4 — the last one:** *"I can feel the first hallucinations and notice how the LSD is starting to kick in, extremely fast. It's becoming difficult not to lose control, I'm hearing voices, I'm drifting and talking to someone who isn't there. First locusts appearing, occasionally confused. I think this journey isn't going to end well. Considering calling an ambulance, noticing how time and space are slowly dissolving. I can feel myself getting heavier, my legs are giving out, I'm going to lose consciousness, I can't collapse yet, I have to get to bed."* --- ## Immersion With enormous effort I drag myself to my room. Lock the door from the inside. Throw the key away — so I can't find it during a possible fugue state. Then I let go. First everything goes black. Then color. Then black again. I'm falling through space and time. Radiant color in every direction, as though traveling through dimensions. Emotionally there's no fear — only fascination. Then questions begin to surface. Who am I? What am I? What is the meaning of life and death? I fall into the void like something being drawn into a black hole. Alone in the darkness, further and further, without end. Everything around me has dissolved. Nothing remains — only me. No body. Just a consciousness. A solitary consciousness adrift in limitless emptiness. > *Would you go on existing inside another version of yourself? Would you simply become "nothing"? What is nothing? Are all other versions of a person also people — or possibly other beings, other entities entirely?* I turn these questions over for what feels like an eternity. I arrive at the conclusion that multiverses must exist, and with them, multiple forms of the self. *What happens when you die? Am I already dead? Is this the afterlife?* Then I stop existing in the void — and begin falling again. Faster and faster. --- ## Emotional Layer Suddenly: my room. I'm in bed. The poster is just a poster again. I must have lost consciousness. I sit up, check the computer: what year is it? What day? What time? 9 PM. Something is wrong. It *cannot* be 9 PM — I feel clear. No halluzinations, no fogginess. Is it really over? Then an emotional emptiness spreads through me. Not visual — emotional. Growing wider, more suffocating. Everything becomes colder. Joy, love, curiosity — all of it receding behind a wall of blankness, coldness, meaninglessness. It's as though the room itself is cracking apart. I try to turn it around. I sit on the floor and meditate in this unreal atmosphere. I murmur prayers to no one in particular. A moment later, I wake up again. --- ## Thought Patterns This time I wake up *properly*. Briefly clear. First: shock. Intense pain, pins and needles everywhere, compromised breathing. A burning sensation as though something inside me is on fire. My skin looks aged, fragile. I lie completely flat, unwilling to move. What I see next would fill pages. The walls are red, green, purple, pink, orange — every color imaginable, plus colors I can't name. Divine music plays from somewhere that isn't my speakers. Every wall pulses. Text appears and disappears — sometimes just "LSD" in shimmering letters, sometimes entire passages that read like novels. The light shifts constantly — dark one moment, searingly bright the next, with beams and laser-like streaks cutting through the air. Swarms of locusts. Crevices opening in the floor through which rivers of ants run. Spiders. And then: the dwarves. Tiny people and dwarves filling every corner of the room. A dense, perpetually moving crowd. On my left wall, enormous scaffolding on which the dwarves are mining into the plaster — complete with a small rail system and mine carts. A train assembles itself from nothing and rides through the room. > *It looked exactly like a Hieronymus Bosch painting — operating by the same internal logic, the same sense of normalcy-within-madness. Only the LSD added an insane richness of color, so the hallucinations didn't just appear painted — they pulsed, flickered, radiated light.* I want to reach my pipe to ease the physical pain, but my body is almost completely paralyzed. Only my hands respond, barely. So I drag and pull myself across the room — like a slug, with painful care not to injure any of the dwarves or creatures. Because by now, I believe everything is real. I know I've taken something — but I believe the combination has transported me to a parallel world. If I hurt someone here, I would actually be hurting them. Occasionally the dwarves bark at me for being in the way. I apologize. --- ## Peak At some point I need to get out of the room. I had thrown the key away earlier. So begins what I can only describe as an epic quest to find it. *Reality has dissolved. Departed. Gone on holiday — taking logic along with it, hand in hand.* I turn to the dwarves for help. Find keys, but none of them fit. The discarded keys pile up — the more I try, the more appear. Eventually one works. In the bathroom I nearly die of fright: a venomous snake directly in front of me. I scramble onto the rim of the bathtub. Look down into it — a crocodile. Panic. I drag myself out of the bathroom and pull the door shut. On the way to the kitchen I discover my model dinosaur landscape — it has become a working Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs hunt and devour each other. I crawl closer and watch them for what feels like half an eternity. Gradually they, too, go full-color, as if an invisible brush is moving through the room. The kitchen is a disappointment. Completely normal. The trip must be over. I drag myself to the camera. The following three sentences take me 31 minutes: *"I believe there are different realities. I know it. I am in another world, I have discovered it. What I am in one reality, I am simultaneously something else in another, in parallel. I have realized that I am a magician. I can cast spells. Watch."* I convince myself my hand is aging and growing young again in real time. I hold a conversation with a friend who isn't there. Then gravity increases. The world collapses. Cut to black. The camera footage later shows me crawling into bed and losing consciousness. --- ## Reflection What follows is the most intense experience of my life. When I regain consciousness, I am somewhere else. Not in my room. Not in my apartment. I find myself in a vast, impossible ice wilderness — mountains and forests stretching as far as I can see. I wander without direction. Over mountains, through forests. Without purpose. Without knowing who I am. I've forgotten completely — my name, my past, everything. And a cold that is impossible to describe. To avoid freezing I make fires at night. I wander through snow-covered forests, first aimlessly, then searching for food. > *It was so cold, so immeasurably cold. There are no words adequate for it.* After what feels like days, a blizzard hits. I push through the storm searching for shelter. Find none. I collapse in the snow. I accept that I am going to die. I am nobody. Nameless. Without identity, without a past. I begin to cry. The tears freeze on my face. As I'm losing consciousness, a voice cuts through clearly: *"Remember."* But I cannot remember. Everything goes black. When I wake, I'm in a warm bed inside a cabin. A fireplace. The storm rages outside. The door opens — a snow-covered figure enters. The silhouette of a woman. She sits on the edge of the bed. Explains that she found me collapsed in the blizzard days ago. I've been asleep for three days. She asks my name. I can't answer. She says that's okay — it will come back with time. What happens next defies any summary. I live weeks, months in that cabin. With her. > *It was the longest stretch I have ever spent inside a journey like this. I suspect the LSD distorted my sense of time beyond anything I'd experienced before.* She encourages me to remember. Eventually — it must be months later — we are in a grand, striking city called Fanalia. I overhear a stranger on the street say my name. Time stops. I remember. My name. What I am. She beams at me, happy for me. But I am not happy. I've grown accustomed to this new life. I don't want to let it go. Then the world collapses. I cry. I hold onto her. I try not to let go. I refuse to leave. It doesn't matter. I wake up in my room. > *I had lived months in that world. Taken on an entirely new identity. It was one of the happiest periods of my life, and I would have done anything never to have remembered my name.* I lie still. Stare at the ceiling. And there she is — on the poster. The same person. I cry again. --- ## Afterglow The return wasn't a single awakening. It was a series of surfacings, interspersed with deceptions. Lying there, I slowly recognized: the city names, the people — all of it drawn from films and fiction I'd absorbed. Connections I hadn't wanted to see. *It must have been real. Who knows — maybe fiction generates new realities.* Dry mouth. Thirst. Kitchen. It's the middle of the night, though it was daytime moments ago. 3 AM. A knock at the door. Suddenly it's daytime. A friend stands at the entrance. *"Hey, you okay?"* We sit down. He asks orientation questions — who am I, where am I. Then the decisive one: *"How many people are in this room?"* He grins. I look around. Just us two. But if it were just us two, he wouldn't be grinning like that. I hear whispering. Voices I can't locate visually. Then he's gone. Fear sets in. First I lose *her*, and now I'm invisible to everyone else? I call his name. No response. I thought I'd died. That I was wandering as a ghost. That this world experienced me as something foreign. Then: an ant. In that moment it became clear — I am still here. It's not over yet. Not a beautiful world, but better than no world at all. I later call my roommate to apologize for not answering the door. He tells me he wasn't there — he'd stayed elsewhere because he knew I was tripping. *Oh. Right. Must have been a hallucination. Okay. Bye.* Once again I stop trusting the world around me. In the middle of the night, my room becomes a paradise for locusts. Spiders and flies everywhere. I barely notice anymore — I've grown accustomed. I make a pizza, but the locusts eat it before I can take a bite. Furious, I make another. Then the trip surges again, as if it wants one final statement. This time the hallucination is purely Bosch — dark, absurd, epic. My room transforms into another world. Miniature trees grow from the floorboards. Walls become rock faces. The dwarves return. Flies become dragons. Mythical creatures emerge from every surface. An epic war unfolds in front of me. I take the side of the dwarves. After what feels like an eternity, we win. Afterward we simply sit together. > *It had the quality of a Hieronymus Bosch painting — crowded, absurd, simultaneously comic and menacing. A world that follows no logic and yet feels completely convincing.* I spend the rest of the night with the dwarves. Even my dreams belong to them. By Monday morning, the hallucinations are beginning to fade. Insects still, absurd objects, but they start morphing and losing coherence. Around noon I try to sleep, but imaginary insects keep waking me. Eventually I run out of patience. The journey is over. --- ## Conclusion The days that followed, I wasn't myself. The boundary between hallucination and reality had shifted — not dramatically, but perceptibly. Every perception carried a quiet question with it: *Is this real?* I had lost my identity completely and taken on a new one. Had lived months in another world. Had loved and grieved — over something that never existed. Or did it? Normality returned slowly. But the ice world didn't disappear entirely. It sat beneath the surface. Sometimes it shimmered through. Although parts of this journey were profoundly disturbing, it was one of the most intense experiences of my life. It managed to be unimaginably vivid and then suddenly unimaginably dark. It was the first time I experienced total identity loss alongside a complete dissolution of reality — without a full blackout. What occupies me most: was it really imagined? It's not the first time I've spent weeks trapped inside a hallucination. But what I experienced felt far too real to be unreal. > *Is the self I have now truly the right self? Am I the real me? Are there multiple versions of me running in parallel? I know only one thing: I intend to get to the bottom of it. But for now, I will be myself in this reality — whatever reality turns out to mean.* --- ## Harm Reduction — Why This Experience Was Extremely Dangerous - **No external supervision.** The single most important safety measure was completely absent. In the event of unconsciousness or medical emergency, no one would have been there. - **Polydrug escalation under impairment.** The decision to add LSD was made while already cognitively compromised — a classic pattern in serious adverse events. - **Acutely toxic plants.** Tropane alkaloids (atropine, scopolamine, hyoscyamine) have an extremely narrow therapeutic window. The margin between active and lethal dose is minimal. - **No functional emergency plan.** Emergency measures were prepared but practically useless without a sober companion present. - **Multi-day unmonitored effects.** Delirious states with loss of consciousness carry risks of aspiration, dehydration, and hypothermia. **Why reality-testing failed completely:** Tropane alkaloid delirium removes the dual awareness typical of psychedelics — the background knowledge that one is in an altered state. The brain constructs an entirely convincing alternative reality, complete with emotional plausibility. Reality-testing presupposes knowing that it's necessary.