I had a giant hallucination. I had a giant hallucination and yet it didn’t seem like a hallucination at the time because I thought it was real. I had this big, big hallucination and they said it was the world. They said it was my life, they said it was my mind. All a big, big hallucination they said. A frighteningly big hallucination. So big, so big…

It was so big that it swallowed me all up. It was terrifyingly big. It was everything to me. It was the whole world. The hallucination was that I existed. That’s what they told me, anyway. They told me that I was a victim of a hallucination and that none of it was real. I had been mistaken when I thought it was.

‘Who are ‘they’ ?’ you ask. That’s always the question, isn’t it? Who are ‘they’, who are ‘they’, who are ‘they’? I hate it when people say that to me. They is they. They is always they – the Alien Conspiracy, the Spooky Unseen Presence, the Otherworldly Tribunal, whenever you want to call them. The Star Council, if you will. The Cosmic Adjudicators. The Mind-Manipulators. The ones who put their thoughts in your head. They told me that I had had a hallucination, anyway. None of it was true, in other words. None of it was true but I thought at the time that it was.

I wanted to ask them if there was something terribly wrong with me because that’s what it felt like. It felt that there was something frighteningly wrong with me for having such a huge hallucination, such a total hallucination. How could that happen? I hallucinated the whole universe, apparently. I hallucinated my whole life and yet I didn’t know it. I’m very frightened by the thought of that. Everything felt so real, and then the next minute it wasn’t. I couldn’t understand it and I couldn’t talk to anyone about it either. How can you talk to someone about the world being a hallucination when they are part of that very same hallucination? Obviously you can’t….

There’s something terribly lonely about it. Lonely and sad. You know that you’re not really there. You understand this and it makes you sad. You understand it but you also know that there is no one you can talk to about it. You know that only too well. It’s that spooky feeling that someone could pull the plug on you at any moment – none of it is real and it never was. You aren’t here at all. Something else is going on but you don’t know what that is. You’re afraid to find out. I wanted to ask them if perhaps I was very sick and maybe dying. Was that the reason? Was it something wrong with me? Was I on a life-support machine?

There is no ‘they’ really of course. I made them up. There is nobody. There is nobody of the sort. There is no conspiracy, no psychic commentators, no star council, no cosmic tribunal, no nothing. There was more no one I could ask; no one who could tell me anything. All there was is this awful feeling of loneliness. ‘Maybe you were on drugs?’ you might be thinking. ‘Maybe that was it.’ But no – that wasn’t it. I had no body, you see. My body wasn’t a real thing and so drugs aren’t real either. My body was a hallucination just like everything else was. Just like my life was. Mind-altering drugs are a hallucination, everything was just a hallucination. I know people like talking about hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and LSA and STP and ALD -52 and all the rest, and that makes it sound as if it’s the drug that makes the hallucination. That’s not true though – it’s the hallucination that makes the drug. We’ve got it the wrong way round. The drugs are the hallucination and it’s a mistake to think otherwise. LSD is a hallucination, along with all the rest. So no – I wasn’t on drugs…

There was this one day when I realised that I was having a very big hallucination. The biggest hallucination ever. I was hallucinating myself. I was hallucinating my whole life. I was hallucinating that there was such a thing as LSD but there wasn’t. You can’t blame the drugs this time I’m afraid. It’s bigger than that. It’s much bigger than that, bigger than you can ever imagine. It’s as if you’re smoking some extra-strong hallucinogenic drug in a pipe and you’re holding a match to it and taking a deep breath. You’re filling your lungs to capacity. But the drug is too strong, too potent, and you realise that you’re not smoking the pipe but that the pipe is smoking you. You’re just a bit of white smoke twisting around in the air. You’re not real at all – the pipe smoked you, that’s all. It’s you that’s the hallucination.