It was on a drive to Grizzly Peak, a designated spot at the top of the Berkeley hills to gaze upon the Bay Area, that I decided to do away with my apprehension and take over a dozen of those dreadful pink pills. At 20 mg each, reaching my intended dosage of 400 mg required an almost absurd amount of tin foil and plastic to get the required amount. My friends gazed at me with strange bemusement. Why would anyone willingly do this to themselves? I didn’t really have an answer. It just felt necessary. As if my life would be incomplete if I did not experience the abyss I was about to plummet into. I had barely done my research. Just enough to know I was in for an extremely miserable time and to know my dosage wasn’t on the more extreme end of things. Beyond that I was going in cold. My friends would only be with me on the come-up while they smoked weed. Soon as the effects began to hit me they’d drop me off at my place per my request. I didn’t want there to be any interference with the hallucinations.
A common misunderstanding people have is that psychedelics produce hallucinations. This isn’t quite right. The visual distortions and patterns as well as the vivid imagery is better classified as pseudohallucinations and illusions; a true hallucination is perceived as being entirely real by the subject experiencing it with no indication that they are in an altered state of mind. The only class of drugs to produce authentic visual hallucinations are known as Deliriants and they are not commonly taken recreationally due to their dark, intense nature which is why all the ways of achieving this state of mind remain legal or over the counter—they’re so unpopular they’re not worth regulating. It’s this forbidden, hidden in plain sight mystique that beckoned me and gave them their deadly allure. What would I find on the other end traveling down this dark road few others dared to tread?
I’m sure you’ve heard of what I took. Very likely you have some in your own medicine cabinet and have never given the substance a second thought. It’s called diphenhydramine (DPH) but is best known as Benadryl. That’s right, your basic allergy meds are also tiny pink pills of terror! How could I not be intrigued? And so it was that I found my heart rate steadily increasing, keeping pace with the long, twisting, upward sloping road that led us to our destination. I couldn’t tell if the beat of my heart was due to excitement or the effects of the drugs. Maybe both? But I tried not to dwell on it much. Getting lost in your head about the effects of the drug you just imbibed is a dangerous set of thoughts to entertain on a come-up.
We had set out just as the sun was setting and as the darkness began to encroach upon the light, so too did the stray thoughts of malaise and unease. I began fidgeting in my seat. Something was off. I could sense it. Wave after wave of doubt began to wash over me. What the hell had I just done to myself? Was it too late to pull over and try to puke out the pills before they were fully digested? My breathing began to feel heavier. Swallowing felt like a momentous task, as if with each gulp my fears would begin to materialize into this world. Before I knew it the sun had been swallowed whole and all that was left was a dark, dense, surreal purple night sky as beautiful as it was menacing. There was no turning back. This would be my reality. This is final. This is fated. This is it. This is the end.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes. In the retinas of my mind I could see myself: my labored breathing, the sweat beginning to crown my forehead, my hand wringing with anxious anticipation. That’s when I noticed a funny feeling in my hands. At first a light tingle then a definite pulsing sensation as if my hands were being pumped full of air. I watched in terror as my hands began to swell to ludicrous proportions like blowing into a latex glove. And they swelled and swelled and swelled. They began to take up the entire backseat. No longer made of bone but just a cavity of air. Panic. They were near their bursting point. My hands were about to pop. What would happen then? “You know” a dark voice responded. I knew. They would explode and my hands would be gone. Just like that. A deep dread began to set in as I felt the same tingling sensation set in on my neck. My head was next. So this is how I died.
BANG! Just as suddenly as the mental images had set in they vanished and I was ruthlessly thrust back into reality. I could breathe in sanity once more but knew my supply was limited. I asked if my hands were alright. I couldn’t bear to look down and find out they were gone. Dread. That’s what this was. A fatalistic sense of dread had engulfed me. I hadn’t felt waves of unease crashing against me as I initially thought. No. I had waded into a deep pool of terror and that malaise was the first current my soul had felt. Anguish. Then a rising sense of impending doom. The kind you feel when you read the prophecies of Revelations forecasting the rise of a primeval evil. Apocalypse is around the corner. The Day of Judgment has come. Know, mere mortal that anguish is mercy. You know only of the crassness of physical pain encumbered by limits. What affliction you’ll be subject to have no end. You cannot conceive of the suffering a lowly spirit like yours can be subject to. The Earth began to open up. The abyss beckoned. Demonic hands reach out clamoring for blood. Any moment now my soul would be lost forever to the chasms of hell. With a final deep breath I awaited my execution. My soul began to wail. An inferno of unspoken voices assaulted all my senses. I could sense it. This was it.
I opened my eyes. A deeply purple sky as beautiful as it was menacing greeted me. The car had come to a standstill. I was alone. In front of me nothing but the crescent moon and a beautiful palm tree jutting out from the terraced slopes. I was neither in the world of the living or the dead but of the damned, of those marooned on this ghastly earth in that liminal realm where ghosts & other spooks reside. The sense of impending doom hadn’t so much receded as it had given way to a horrid dimension.
I heard my friends enter the car but it was as if they were nothing more than mere phantasms. I could only see their outlines, strange silhouettes with no definite proportions . Their voices sounded distant. Distorted. I could feel the heat of the living emanating from them, a strange substance in this world of passing mist. A deep fog was beginning to set in but I had no way of knowing whether it was from this world or theirs. I gazed at the palm tree once more. A distant memory of a bizarre game flooded me. Even as a child that game had felt occult. Now I understood why. The creatures of that realm existed where I’d been condemned. As I pondered this something peculiar took place: half of the tree trunk inverted itself. I’d never seen anything like it. It was as if the windshield was a computer monitor and the vision of the sky nothing more than an image on Photoshop. Someone had drawn a square over half of the palm tree and then mirrored it so that crown now floated in midair, levitating from a the force of a dark spell. So this was a real hallucination. I tried to tell my friends to start heading back for it had finally happened. The words came out slowly. Raspy. In spurts. I was a ghost trying to send my message to the other realm. Who knew what they’d hear?
Ages passed. I wasn’t sure how many times I had made my incantation to the living. That was worth noting. Events seemed to happen. Time then went still. Then I’d be back to where I started before I willed my body to move or act. As if my moves had been recorded and rewinded. I could no longer be sure what had happened or what was to be. Those concepts meant little here. The car’s headlights turned on revealing a phantasmagoric essence to the fog. The light didn’t so much pierce it as it fused with it creating its own spectral glow unlike anything I had seen before. I understood then that the fog was its own entity with deep layers. It existed in the world I had just left, yes, but I witnessed its unnatural qualities, those qualities which perturb the soul and afflict the subconscious, which give foggy dawns and evenings their ethereal feel and awaken a primal sense of danger from the cavernous depths of the human psyche.
Strange. In front of us there was a cyclist. Judging by the torn flannel clothes and shoddy backpack he seemed homeless. At first he was directly in front of the car. Suddenly he shifted to the side. How did we not run over him? I told my friend to slow down. We could have hit that guy.
“What guy?”
The rest of the trip home I kept seeing the same figure emerge from the fog. Each time we came close to hitting him but he’d vanish into thin air just before the car would collide with him. A perverse creation of the fog. With each return his body would be less defined. Like an outline of a person, an uncompleted concept slowly vanishing into the mist. I felt a deep guilt. As if I was purposefully conjuring him and inflicting his gradual loss of self each time I summoned his image. I was an unwilling participant to his demise.
Arriving home felt like a blessing. Not only was I out of reach from that horrid fog but I no longer had to spend what little mental faculties I still had control over trying to maintain a façade of normalcy. I could stare off into space as time stood still without worry. It’s as if my brain completely froze and all that I could make out was a weird kind of static emanating from deep within me. These bouts of stupor were not unlike the unpleasant inability to form thoughts that comes with a high fever. I would snap out of the stupor at randomly, abruptly feeling my body jerk awake and realizing I had no recollection of the how much time had elapsed before shortly feeling my mind begin to wander once more and knowing I’d be in the throes of another deep stupor once more.
During what little time I had before I would succumb to the next bout of stupor I would do my best to take note of the room I was in. The lighting had a sinister dark orange glow teasing their hellish origins. What had been white walls now possessed a sickly yellow hue contaminated with a deep rot borne of severe water damage and toxic mold. Shadows and dimly lit portions of the room became amorphous, live entities trying to contort themselves into abominations, trying to will themselves into a blasphemous existence. At times dark dots would materialize on the ceiling. These too felt alive but as a deep poison that could corrupt matter itself. At the corners of the ceiling a dark, angular matter began to take deep root. Unlike the other stretches of darkness this was not alive but instead signaled the parts of this realm that had been swallowed by The Void. I could sense that there was something different about that dark matter. It wasn’t a mere distortion of the world I had left but instead a harbinger of spiritual decay that threatened to overtake my reality. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be strong enough to break through but that I had called its presence was itself a deep sin. It was not meant to enter the world of humans.
I would also see a wisp of smoke begin to materialize a few feet away from me as if I had lit a cigarette I had forgotten about and it was gently burning in the ether. Dancing around seductively it beckoned me with glee knowing its movements triggered visceral disgust in me. It was Vice itself freely floating about trying to bind me, the more drawn to it I felt the more I could sense my soul suffocating. Relishing my captive audience it enjoyed mocking me with its enticing allure, a sin come to life nakedly gloating over the power it has over men. I could tell that the strength of the smoke signaled how deep in the throes of insanity I was.
Occasionally I’d break out of a stupor and find myself gazing at a homeless man carelessly sitting on the kitchen chair near the couch. Our conversations were mundane to the point of absurdity—here was a man who had materialized out of thin air and the most I thought to ask him was how his day had been going. Small talk such as how long he planned to stay would ensue. His features were well defined even if I can’t remember the details. Think plain brown garments and dirtied jeans. Nothing that stuck out. Our conversation would last for hours without going anywhere and whenever I would suddenly be reminded of the passage of time I would jerk my head up only to realize I had been talking to no one. At one point my housemate showed up to tell me he was going to the gym. I told him I was tripping and if he was real to touch me. He did. I felt his skin. I knew he was no hallucination. From then on out sometimes it wasn’t the homeless man but my housemate who would greet me out of my stupor though our conversations were no more interesting. When did you get back from the gym? or What did you make for food? were the questions I’d ask. Sometimes he’d be eating yogurt. Other times some spaghetti. He’d just hold on to the plate never once taking a bite and maintaining firm eye contact. Then I’d jolt back and realize he never came back.
Tired of this sudden shifts in reality I began to wonder what would occur if I watched some TV. I had recently been binge watching South Park so I put it on but didn’t have the cognitive ability to chose an episode and my vision was blurry so I couldn’t really make out episode titles anyway. I just chose the episode that was next. It was a mediocre one where Stan and Kyle make some puppets out of a paper bag while Cartman gets jealous of their newly made friends. I found that watching TV lessened the unpleasant intensity of the stupors. At least with some background noise it was easier not to feel swallowed up by the sands of time. I could better gauge how long I had lost cognitive control.
Effects seemed to last for about five hours but had peaked after three after which it was a tiresome drudge back to my own world. Slowly The Void began to recede. Layers of the sickly yellow hue began to peel back revealing the boring whites of reality. The sinister fire that accentuated the lights began to flicker and wane. Spots on the ceiling became minor dots and blemishes. The ugliness of the world around me began to fade away but it wasn’t replaced by a sense of beauty or appreciation. Just a numb emptiness and sense that my spirit had been violated in some way. I asked my housemate what it had been like seeing me in this state and he mentioned that I mostly seemed passed out while muttering to myself. Apparently I never did turn on the TV let alone watched any show. The episode I saw of South Park was an elaborate confabulation of my mind. This actually shocked me because at one point I had turned up the volume and had been met with louder sounds reaching my ears. That’s surprisingly thorough for an entirely made up hallucination.
Physically speaking the effects are pretty grueling. An intense cottonmouth that cannot be satiated by any water defines the experience. Walking hurts. Your feet are concrete slabs and when they land on the floor they stomp on your brain as if you were intent on killing off a few neurons. Worse than trying to walk when you’re drunk since you’re not just disoriented and stumbling around but your very sense of gravity seems to shift freely to optimize your sense of nausea. To top it all off the day after you’ll be unable to read anything since you’ll be plagued with double vision. For me it lasted a day and a half. Worst part of the hangover though is a sensation that your brain has been shattered into a million pieces that can never be put back together. Thoughts feel strained and of a lesser quality than before your little misadventure. It takes about a week for your brain to feel “normal” once more.
You’d think that after describing such a dreadful, miserable experience that this would have been the end of my explorations with this nasty stuff but this presupposes I am a rational agent. See, I had heard that in high enough doses you can see spiders and shadow people along with other more vibrant distortions. Dosage for these effects is around 700 mg and above. So, a few months later, on a day I felt particularly depressed I decided to go to 600 mg and give that a try. I was doing a re-watch of Breaking Bad and knew just the episode to complement this morbid experiment. There’s a plot point of Jessie throwing a party out of emotional numbness that lasts for weeks and gets progressively more depraved and disgusting until he finds himself alone, on the floor, nothing left but his depression and a decaying house full of filth. How could I not pass up an opportunity to see if external stimulus would make a bad trip even worse?
Surprisingly witnessing Jessie lose control of his life in sync with the come-up of the trip actually made it more bearable. Don’t get me wrong, there was still a deep seated sense of dread as well as a sense of impending doom that marked the entire experience but it felt less spiritually significant. Instead, it was as if I was living the misery I saw on screen but at least I wasn’t completely alone in the suffering. It was almost cathartic having some images to go along with the sense of fatalism that marks the onset of the deliriant. In some sense it felt like the depressive episode itself had come alive, forced me to endure the worst of it and then disappear as the plot of the show progressed. It was deeply unsettling but at least it didn’t feel as if the very gates of hell had opened up clamoring for my soul.
At some point after I had been thrust into that liminal world of the damned I became aware of a presence. I would liken this feeling to when someone has been staring at you behind your back and you can just sense that someone is there watching your every move but whereas that seems to stem from a physical reaction what I’m describing here was my very spirit sensing this entity. Much the same way as I could tell The Void wouldn’t be strong enough to envelop the liminal realm I had stumbled into, I could sense that this wasn’t quite the realm of this presence—like a radio picking up a signal just outside of its frequency. My soul knew it could see me and sense me but also that it wasn’t quite interested in me, though I had no idea why. Most striking of all though was how malicious the entity felt. I knew if I approached it I would be in severe danger and that if I ever encountered it on its own realm that it would try to do as much psychic damage to me as possible. The malevolence of this entity was its defining characteristic, its very reason of existence. Immensely powerful and cruel beyond belief, I knew this entity was older than time. An eldritch horror from another dimension.
I’m not the only one to run into this entity. It’s quite notorious among those who abuse DPH and those who suffer from sleep paralysis, so much so that he has his own name and something of a cult reminiscent of the transgressive celebrity bestowed upon serial killers. His name is Hatman and he belongs to a larger group of entities called the Shadow People. Whereas Shadow People are usually just silhouettes that resemble a human body, Hatman is unique both for sporting a hat but also donning a trench coat. Reports are almost universally similar in that he emanates a malicious, deeply evil energy though curiously not all Shadow People do (if anything, Shadow People in general tend to feel more neutral though are still disturbing to encounter). He seems to be much more active when encountered in the state of sleep paralysis where people report to have felt him strangle them or put his weight on their chest. If there’s any credence to be believed to my spirit’s intuition about the realm of delirium not being where he actually resides, this makes disturbing sense: he is a creature from the dark chambers of the primordial subconscious and can only be fully summoned from thence, while intoxicated the very chemicals that draw him to your spirit prevent his full manifestation.
What most unsettled me about encountering the Hatman was when I noticed my cat was staring straight ahead, frozen still, very tense gazing precisely where the Hatman stood. Thinking she could be a hallucination, I made the treacherous journey to where she stood to touch her. Hallucinations may be potent but they vanish into vapor when you try to touch them and to my dismay I felt her fur and tense muscles. She barely seemed to register that I had moved closer to her as her entire attention was focused on where the Hatman stood. This behavior was unusual for Soybean who passes all of her time napping away and eating. She’s the most carefree cat in the world so to see her tensed up, staring ahead at what should be empty space would be bizarre even under normal circumstances. She remained transfixed, as if in a deep trance, until I sensed the Hatman began moving to another dimension. As soon as he had arrived he was gone and with it, Soybean returned to her normal behavior. I’ll be honest, I’ve never known quite what to make of that.
To make things even creepier, a Japanese man once made a game to replicate his dreams for the N64. Among the surreal oddities one would expect of such a game there is also an entity that ominously appears that bears an undeniable resemblance to Hatman. This game was made in the 90’s way before internet forums had really taken off and Hatman was widely known. How bizarre is it to think that a Japanese man in an entirely different culture had seen Hatman and that Americans suffering from sleep paralysis or overdosing on Benadryl also run into this entity?
I won’t pretend to know any of the answers. Before, in my less spiritual days of youth I would just dismiss this as an odd cultural phenomenon. Now I’m less sure I would be so cavalier to make light of these instances. All I can say with certainty is that when you are on a DPH trip it’s like your spiritual senses are awakened out a recognition that its in severe danger. Maybe it’s worth listening to that worry. Whatever the case may be I strongly urge you not to take DPH yourself. The experience is completely horrid and has no redeeming qualities. You’re also putting yourself at immense risk by abusing drugs of this nature. Be smarter than I was as a young adult. Stay far away and pray you never run into the Hatman.
