Mushroom Samba

"Butt-head, I think I'm freaking out."

Frog: Hey, mister, this here's the stairway to heaven. Ya'll know that, don'tcha?
Spike: Obnoxious talking frog.

—Cowboy Bebop

Implied or accidental use of mind-altering substances by characters, but notably by the protagonists (villains, of course, can do anything). Usually very obvious to the attentive audience but may have to get around the censors under a different/invented name or by making the usage involuntary. Sometimes, the hallucinations are passed off as a side-effect of overconsumption of an otherwise legal and legitimate foodstuff such as sugar, ice cream, chocolate, or steak sauce.

What makes this trope generally different from Intoxication Ensues is the hallucinations and the person in question is otherwise acting normally. To them, the hallucinations are either commonplace or a mere curiosity. The narrative might jump back and forth between the hallucination and the real world to show they are holding a normal, intelligent conversation with a plant. Typically great comedic fodder with a believable setup on network television, but safer to do on cable. If it's animated, expect those affected to Open the Iris.

If it doesn't contain An Aesop about the dangers of drug abuse with Anvilicious subtlety, it tends to just show off a character's carelessness.

May involve a G-Rated Drug. See also Acid Reflux Nightmare for a food-related version. Sometimes leads to a Disney Acid Sequence. If it's a whole group of people experiencing it simultaneously, it's Everybody Must Get Stoned. See also Through the Eyes of Madness.

No Fanon, please! If it doesn't explicitly involve hallucinations caused by substances, don't reinterpret it as if Everyone Is Ringo On LSD.

Examples of Mushroom Samba include:

Anime & Manga

  • Cowboy Bebop features the Trope Namer episode "Mushroom Samba": The crew confuses "magic mushrooms" with the regular sort, with the result that Spike ends up meeting a talking frog on an endless stairway, Faye steps into the water closet/loo and ends up in the ocean with fish going by, and Jet starts talking to his bonsai plants ("I know the secrets of the Universe! Now, who am I again?"), leaving Edward and Ein to track down the crook of the week. This is after Ein has taken a small bite from one of the magic mushrooms and spent some time hopping around stiffly like a clockwork dog.
  • Samurai Champloo
    • There's an episode where a field of "grass" was set on fire, with... interesting results.
    • Another episode is closer in spirit to its Cowboy Bebop predecessor, where the heroes run into zombies and they and the viewer are partially left to question whether or not it was the result of some "wild mushrooms" they consumed at the episode's beginning.
  • One Piece
    • During the Alabasta arc, when the crew wanders through the desert, Luffy accidentally eats the wrong kind of cactus, and apparently hallucinates about enemies. He also hallucinates about a tidal wave (in the middle of a desert?!) and tries to beat it up.
    • Despite Luffy being the Idiot Hero, he has a considerable amount of useful (and questionable) knowledge. Some of the questionable knowledge was shown when he first arrived in Amazon Lily, where he shows too much knowledge about hallucinogenic mushrooms (and start eating them in speedball fashion to cope with the fact that he lost all of his crewmates and couldn't do anything about it).
  • Kimagure Orange Road has the cast in a field trip searching for rare blue mushrooms that would force anyone who ate them to tell the truth or act as their true self; naturally with the intent on using it on each other. To prevent this, one of the ESPers (Kurumi, male lead Kyosuke's sister) uses her powers to turn EVERY mushroom blue. As the characters contrive to feed each other fungus, various zany situations crop up due to the apparently behavioural-altering effects of common mushrooms.
  • Sato's delusions from Welcome to The NHK are heavily implied to be this in the manga. In the anime they're implied to be schizophrenia. In the novel they're explicitly attributed to drug use.
  • In the Dragonball Z movie Dead Zone, Gohan eats an apple growing in Garlic Jr.'s garden. The minion guarding him goes nuts, telling Gohan that "Children can't eat those. They see things." Cue drug-trip montage.
    • In the abridged version, Vinegar (the minion) warns Gohan that the apple is laced with LSD.
    • In some dubs (e.g. Brazilian Dub), the Elite Mook warns him that the fruit is actually alcoholic, making it unsuitable for children. That explains why he (Vinegar) could eat them.
    • This was also the reason given on the Hong Kong Cantonese dub. Given that Vinegar in reality is produced by oxidizing Ethanol (read: Drinking alcohol, according to The Other Wiki), it makes sense in context and is pure Fridge Brilliance.
  • A variant occurs in Eyeshield 21, where after the game against the Nasa Aliens, Sena starts hallucinating out of exhaustion.
  • In the manga Yamada Taro Monogatari, Taro is given a bag of "flour" from a rich classmate, and uses it to cook pancakes for his family. Later, it is revealed that the huge bag of flour was actually narcotics made from magic mushrooms. However, due to being extremely poor and starved most of the time, Taro and his family were able to digest it with no problems or side effects.
  • In Air Gear, Ikki and Shiraume end up consuming some funny Matsutake mushrooms, with some rather interesting effects. They end up 'fixing' one of Ikki's trecks and turn it into a formula racing car. In the living room.
  • Ninin ga Shinobuden has a large-scale one when the ninjas get some bad mushrooms while mushroom hunting. Then Onsokumaru eats some. Insanity ensues.
  • In episode 4 of Queen's Blade, Reina tries eating a large, spotted mushroom for sustenance. Unfortunately, we don't get to see what she sees.
  • During the infamous island filler arc of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Jean enacts this trope with actual mushrooms. During his hallucinations, he even visions Marie as a moving turkey dish. Hilarity Ensues.
  • The chocolates in episode 15 of Brigadoon Marin and Melan produce... interesting... hallucinations in both the title characters. Leads to Intimate Healing.
  • The Highschool of the Dead Filler OVA episode, Drifters of the dead has the group unintentionally drug themselves by burning toxic hydrangea leaves, causing them all to hallucinate. And this being High School of the Dead the hallucinations get a little explicit.
  • In Black Lion Shishimaru sets a field full of marijuana on fire causing Gennai Doma to hallucinate that there are multiple Shishimaru's and mutant scarecrows everywhere that he continuously cuts down with his sword.
  • In Urusei Yatsura the class eats Nabe and Cherry brings mushrooms which taste like Matsutake mushrooms...


Comic Books

  • This is actually one of the mutant powers of X-Men member Pixie: secreting a hallucinogenic dust that makes people see bizarre things. It even made Wolverine run away from "freakin' unicorns!"
  • In Animal Man Buddy and Dr. Highwater are led by a series of bizarre signs to the desert. On a mountain they find some peyote buttons and decide they are supposed to take them. When they do a multiple issue trip involving talking animals, eyes appearing in the sky, and one of the characters 'killing themselves' ensues.
  • Happened to Hal Jordan in one of his back-up Green Lantern strips in The Seventies with literal mushrooms, which he had picked wild and put into his chili.
  • At some point in one of the Cerebus story arcs, Cerebus is out and about with Prince Mick and Prince Keef, and Mick gives him... something which later causes Cerebus to observe, "... we're all PLANTS! Cerebus can feel it!" He spends the next few frames hallucinating that bits of his face are falling off, and scrambling after them to reattach them "before the sap freezes".
  • The one and only full-color sequence in Sin City involves Wallace, the protagonist, getting drugged by an enemy. He then has to get in a gun fight and Car Chase alongside his former commanding officer. The landscape looks like Frank Miller was channeling Dr. Seuss. During this time, the commanding officer morphed into Hellboy, Rambo, and even a beautiful woman.

Commanding Officer: Are you looking at my ass, son?
Wallace: Sorry, sir.

  • In Superman and Batman Generations, Dick Grayson as Batman is tricked into falling down a shaft lined with razor blades that are coated with hallucinogenics, so when he ends up fighting the Joker posing as Joker Junior, things get...really weird.
  • In the Lucky Luke episode The Ballad of the Daltons, an Indian witch doctor spikes the Daltons' drink with mushroom powder, giving them some pretty weird hallucinations.
  • Jesse takes some peyote to commune with genesis late into Preacher (Comic Book). The effects are... not pleasant.


Fan Works

  • I'm a Marvel And I'm a DC
    • The Green Goblin has a really powerful sedative injected into him to numb the pain while his superpowered healing system deals with being run over by the Batmobile. He has some really funny hallucinations as a result.
    • When Batman does the same to Luthor, this results in the both of them hallucinating. And singing.
  • In Six Days the Animorphs Were Idiots, the brightly colored clouds on the Animorphs book covers are explained as being a result of Marco's illicit drug use.


Films -- Animation

  • One of the most classic Mushroom Samba scenes was in Disney's Dumbo, where Dumbo drinks from a tub of water laced with champagne, and has a wild and disturbing musical fantasy sequence about "Pink Elephants on Parade". That must've been some champagne. In Real Life, zoopsia (the hallucination of animals, including Pink Elephants) is a symptom of sustained alcohol abuse. Perhaps it wasn't Dumbo's first time drinking from that water tub.
    • Elephants are terrible at holding their liquor. Most elephant-related fatalities are also alcohol-related. On the elephant's part.
  • In Beavis and Butthead Do America, Beavis eats some peyote and goes on a hallucinogenic trip seeing himself and Butt-Head as rotting zombies and freaky demons everywhere playing the guitar, driving mini cars, etc., set to some trippy music performed by Rob Zombie. The scene was based on drawings of Rob Zombie's, the music was actually from Rob's now-defunct band White Zombie.
  • Alex the Lion from Madagascar has a brief one after getting hit with a tranquillizer dart. Twice.
  • Lucky Luke: The Ballad of the Daltons has one after the Dalton Bros. drink mushroom-laced water.
  • Happens literally in the movie The Elm Chanted Forest when the hero is captured by talking mushrooms, who proceed to do a whole song-and-dance routine about how awesome it is to be a mushroom. At the end of the routine, they all suddenly grow fangs. It's loosely implied that this is because of something they gave him to turn him into a mushroom himself.
  • Heavily implied in The Road to El Dorado. While in the middle of singing "It's Tough to be a God", Miguel and Tulio smoke some cigars, and the song turns into a full-blown Disney Acid Sequence.


Films -- Live-Action

  • The League of Shadows' blue flowers and Dr. Crane's fear gas/spray from Batman Begins seem to qualify. Decidedly not played for laughs, and in fact is used as a panic-inducing plot point.
  • Subverted in Eurotrip where two of the movie's protagonists, predictably, decide to visit an Amsterdam bakery/coffee shop and trip out on hash brownies. Jenny gets the munchies while Scott simply freaks out (including the random, memorable confession "I saw a gay porno once. I didn't know until halfway in. The girls never came. The girls never came!"). When it gets really intense, the chef informs them that they do not serve hash brownies, meaning that the only thing they were high on was the placebo effect.
    • It doesn't help that the bakery was owned and operated by Jamaicans. Who claim the brownies are "magical."
  • Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny had JB eating mushrooms in a forest and going on an extended Dream Sequence in which he was the son of the Sasquatch. He ends up nearly drowning and falling off several cliffs. It's utterly hilarious.

"Huh. This place is kinda.... JUICY."

  • Kirk tries explaining off Spock's alien behavior on 1986 Earth by saying that he suffered brain damage from too much "LDS" back in the sixties. The whale scientist doesn't buy it.
  • In Beverly Hills Ninja, Haru, interrogating a source, uses a powder made from the "laughing mushroom" as a Truth Serum. However, he sneezes on it, he and love interest Sally Jones also inhale a dose, and the three sit around laughing their asses off at the most frightening and depressing truths.
  • In Salvador, Doctor Rock (James Belushi) slips some LSD into an American TV journalist's cocktail. In the next scene she's talking to the camera, then suddenly sinks to the ground in a fit of laughter.
  • In Lethal Weapon 4 Riggs, Murtaugh and Detective Butters are trying to get a Chinese mob boss to talk, so they sneak in on him while he's at the dentist and give him a snort of nitrous oxide. Unfortunately Butters leaves the inhaler on, so everyone in the room gets a little loopy, leading to the reveal that Butters has gotten Murtaugh's daughter pregnant.
  • Most of the movie Altered States consists of Mushroom Sambas... but they are hardly unintentionally induced, as the main character who undergoes them is researching the very drug behind the phenomenon.
  • Played straight in Labyrinth, Sarah is given a "present" from Jareth - a peach which either causes her to hallucinate or actually transports her to a masquerade ball inside a crystal. There's also a possibility that the whole Labyrinth and such were hallucinated by Sarah, possibly because of a magical owl.
  • Central plot device in the black comedy Death at a Funeral, whereby a pharmacology student creates an experimental designer drug and stores it in an empty Valium bottle. Throughout the movie Mushroom Sambas occur when the hallucinogenic pills are accidentally taken by three characters attending a funeral service. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Empire Records: Mark eats Eddie's "special brownies" and proceeds to hallucinate himself into GWAR's video for Saddam A Go-Go from the album This Toilet Earth, then getting eaten by the World Maggot (the same thing that ate Jerry Springer when GWAR was on his show). He seems to find all this very funny.
  • Reefer Madness, with the pot brownie scene.
  • In the 1996 film William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet, Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) is given an ecstasy pill right before going to the Capulet masked ball—putting Mercutio's "Queen Mab" speech in a different light altogether. Some seriously trippy imagery from his perspective ensues.
  • In 1996's A Very Brady Sequel, conman Trevor Thomas is served hallucinogenic mushrooms in a plate of spaghetti by clueless maid Alice; the subsequent sequence features animation (including dancing pandas and a helicopter-tailed wizard bird from the Filmation Brady Kids cartoon) and the trippy Sixties anthem "Good Morning, Starshine" from Hair (theatre).
  • Across the Universe uses this. It's also taken to a greater level with all the visual imagery used and the fact that the music used is the music of the Beatles...
  • In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Spencer, played by Breckin Meyer, sees all kinds of trippy imagery coming out of the TV, set to Iron Butterfly's "Innagaddadavida", and ends up in a video game.
  • In A Serious Man, the protagonists son Danny becomes a Bar Mizvah stoned.
  • The Bear. The eponymous bear cub finds some toadstools and, curious, eats some. He spends the next few minutes tripping out and whimpering, which is to be expected given what he sees.
  • In Go Manny takes a handful of ecstacy and while in a grocery store starts hearing 'Macarena' and hallucinates that he is dancing with the checkout lady and they are feeding each other bananas.
  • In Suck, Joey mistakes two ecstasy tablets for aspirin before going out on stage. The result: an aptly titled musical number "This Is Your Brain On Drugs" with distorted colors and visions of three vampire band members leering at Joey.
  • In Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, in what is probably the film's best-known sequence, the protagonist snorts some heroin that he thought was cocaine, snorts some actual cocaine to try to balance it out, and ends up hallucinating about iguanas. Later on, after a climactic shootout, he orders that a dead man be shot again because "his soul is still dancing!" And the camera switches to his perspective to show that, yes, he is hallucinating the man's spirit break-dancing over his body.
  • The Canadian film Men with Brooms had a lead character whose father was a regular 'shroom user. There were plenty of jokes about it, though no explicit hallucinatory scenes onscreen.
  • When Jerry of Conspiracy Theory is first captured by Dr. Jonas, his system is pumped full of LSD to make torturing him easier. His hallucinations and distorted perception of the world are notably played for drama rather than laughs.


Gamebooks

  • In Book 4 of the Lone Wolf series, The Chasm of Doom, while in the Maaken Mines, breathing the spores of Calacene mushrooms can cause the hero to hallucinate of a fiendish monster (or a whole swarm of them). The "fight" that ensue cause real damage, however, since Lone Wolf keeps throwing himself against the sharp rocks of the tunnel.


Literature

  • The plot of the late-1960s Hugo-nominated novel The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson revolves around a plot by pacifist aliens to take over the world by overdosing humanity with a drug that causes solid, physical hallucinations that can be seen by people other than the one taking the drug.
  • In A Lion Among Men, The Lion meets some bears who act like stoners. On Honey.
  • In Bored of the Rings, Frito eats some mushrooms and pills provided by whacked-out wayside hippie Tim Benzedrine and hallucinates until he passes out.
  • In Small Gods, Brutha meets a hermit, St. Ungulant, who lives in the desert, and occasionally eats mushrooms:

St. Ungulant: The desert becomes really interesting after the mushroom season.
Brutha: Full of giant purple singing slugs? Talking pillars of flame? Exploding giraffes? That sort of thing?
St. Ungulant: Good heavens, yes. I don't know why. I think they're attracted by the mushrooms.

It was the pollen of the black lotus, which creates deathlike sleep and monstrous dreams; and he knew that only the grisly wizards of the Black Ring, which is the nadir of evil, voluntarily seek the scarlet nightmares of the black lotus, to revive their necromantic powers.'

  • Cryoburn opens with this. "Angels were falling all over the place... Ah, terrific. Auditory hallucinations, too."
  • Soma is a regular cause of Mushroom Sambas in Brave New World.


Live-Action TV

  • Most episodes of That '70s Show have either implied or obvious cannabis use. One Samba moment happens when Foreman goes upstairs to make toast and runs into his father, Red; while they talk, the wall in the background is moving. Also, Red once accidentally eats a "special brownie" made by the kids. Hilarity Ensues.
  • House:
    • House uses LSD to beat off a self-induced migraine (which is another story). "I'm seeing sounds!"
    • And Wilson, when House loads his coffee with sppppppeeeeeeed to see if Wilson was on anti-depressants.
    • On another episode, House uses psychedelic mushrooms to treat a particularly obnoxious teenager's cluster headaches... he mellows out some. (Cue Iron Butterfly and swirling colors.)
  • The George Lopez Show features a drink involving a worm at the bottom of the glass. Drinking the worm induces an instant Dream Sequence episode.
  • Life On Mars 2006 Life on Mars has a sequence in the second season where Sam is accidentally given an overdose causing him to experience several hallucinations and a memorable Dream Sequence where he and Gene are stop motion characters in children's show Camberwick Green. The best bit was probably Gene "beating up a nonce."
  • In the Coupling episode "Jane and the Truth Snake" Jane takes two paracetamol in a failed suicide bid, not having grasped the concept of an overdose. The pills actually aren't paracetamol but something she was given at a party, and Hilarity Ensues as her excessively straight-talking alter ego takes control in the form of a talking snake puppet.
  • In an episode of My Name Is Earl, Randy eats hippy face lotion and begins to see everything in claymation.
  • While in the Deadly Swamp in The Tenth Kingdom, Virginia and Tony consume magic mushrooms (and drink swamp water, which is apparently some form of alcohol). What makes this especially amusing is its literalism: while the mushrooms don't actually dance, they do sway in time to the music and sing their consuming victims to sleep (to Procal Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale" no less!). Cue Dream Sequence. But although the mushrooms seem hell-bent on their own suicidal destruction, this is subverted by the fact that it's all a ploy by the sentient man-eating swamp to shroud its victims in vines so they can be crushed, suffocated, and eventually consumed in turn.
  • Six Feet Under. David stows the E tablets he received from his club-hopping boyfriend in an aspirin bottle in the family kitchen. Ruth goes camping and packs the aspirin in her first aid kit. After getting a headache she does some serious wandering around in the woods. (See also Intoxication Ensues for other repercussions.)
  • In Pushing Daisies, Aunt Lily takes an overdose of homeopathic mood enhancers and starts hallucinating.
  • In some of the early episodes of The Goodies, Bill Oddie's hallucinations are crucial plot points. They are induced by

Graeme: LEMON SHERBERT?
Whenever the sherbert comes up, it's often mentioned that his grandmother sends him it. It's also described as "Not dangerous, but it turns him on".

  • In Flight of the Conchords, Bret, after much fiddling around, accidentally takes a drug, leading to the lighthearted and whimsical "Prince of Parties" musical number.
  • The X-Files
    • Scully starts tripping after getting a tattoo with ergot-laced ink. It's not played for humor at all, as the guy who convinced her to get the tattoo has heard his talking to him for weeks, and it's driven him to kill his downstairs neighbor.
    • There's also "Field Trip," where Mulder and Scully investigate the skeletons of two hikers found in a field. It turns out that the field is covered in mushrooms that trap those who step on them in vivid hallucinations while a Blob Monster under the field goes to work on digesting them.
  • Xena: Warrior Princess, "Altared States": Gabrielle eats some laced bread meant for Ikus. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Parodied in Mystery Science Theater 3000: Pearl Forrester decides to test LSD on the robots (yeah...) and they hook them up to screens so we can see what they see. Servo sees everyone as monsters, but cheerfully says they always look like that to him. The only thing that's different for Crow is that the Milky Way bar Mike was holding suddenly turns into a Snickers, which causes him to freak out. Crow is also surprised to learn that Mike isn't a clown.
  • Star Trek: Voyager has a variation when the Doctor programs himself with the ability to daydream, which soon gets out of control and causes him to switch rapidly between various fantasies. The most amusing parts are the other characters using the holodeck to see his daydreams themselves and as they simply watch his reactions to the different scenarios he's entering and leaving.
  • The Dollhouse episode "Echoes" features the entire cast on one big tripout. The highlight of the whole thing is Topher desperately trying to stay lucid while explaining the situation to their dolls in the field on the phone, while in the background Adelle is jumping on a trampoline and shouts "Say hi for me!" just before he hangs up.

Adelle: I find lentils completely incomprehensible!"

  • In one particular episode of the British series Midsomer Murders, straight-laced Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby tries some (special) brownies while interviewing a possible witness and subsequently comes over all giggly and walks along the top of an ornamental wall, all the while attracting confused looks from his Sergeant and the Coroner.
  • The Farscape episode "Taking The Stone" features Crichton eating one out of a cluster of four magic mushrooms in exchange for a confession from the episode's villain: the twist is that while three of the mushrooms produce a dizzying high, one of them is lethal. Crichton manages to pick one of the safe mushrooms, thankfully, and spends the next minute doing a three stooges impersonation before passing out.
  • One of the final episodes of Lexx, appropriately titled "Trip", half the crew consumed some mind-altering berry-like things that had been left as a gift, which led to some interesting hallucinations.
  • One Life to Live played it in a way rarely seen in fiction; as Cole was going through withdrawal, he hallucinated his family and friends berating him for what a horrible person he was and how he ruined their lives. Basically the Intervention From Hell.
  • In one episode of the short-lived Comedy Central show That's My Bush!, W accidentally takes two hits of Ecstasy, mistaking them for aspirin. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In The Forgotten's "Train Jane", when Walter gets shot, the combination of panic and pain meds make him say wacky things.

Walter: Tell Candice I love her too, okay? But not in the creepy way. And tell Maxine, her blonde hair's like a lighthouse in the darkness, a love lighthouse.
(the doctor informs him that she's going to leave the bullet where it is for now)
Walter: No, no!! You gotta take it out, it's evidence! If you're not gonna, I will! Someone get me a scalpel, stat! I saw this on Animal Planet!

  • In the Granada Television TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes), the stories nearly always stayed very faithful to the original works. In "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," Holmes deduces that several people have been murdered with an exotic poison unknown to British science. In order to be sure that the suspicious substance recovered from the scene of the crime is indeed the mysterious poison, he deliberately exposes himself to what he believes to be a small dose... According to the original story, terrifying hallucinations ensue. In the TV version, the hallucinations shown are actually not particularly terrifying, but Holmes is presumably experiencing far worse ones.
  • Route 66 has an episode where Tod gets a drugged drink at a party by mistake. As is typical of the show, it's not played at all for comedy.
  • How I Met Your Mother has a habit of replacing joints with sandwiches. Justified by the show's Framing Device: Future Ted is supposed to be telling the story to his kids, and so the bit with the drugs is replaced with something more G-rated.
  • In "Blind Man's Bluff," an episode from the second season of The Sentinel, Blair eats a slice of pizza which, unbeknownst to him, is laced with "Golden". A short time later he's wielding a gun in the police garage, and...well...

Blair: You don't see them? They're coming through, through the walls and the floor, man.
Jim: Who are?
Blair: The Golden fire people. You don't see them, man? They're made out of fire and they're burnt. You think they're ashes, but they're alive, man. And we gotta send them back!

Fraser Sr.: I'm dead. I don't dream. So I don't know what this sensation is that I've got. Although it's very similar to when Walter Singlefoot laced my tea with knik-knik, then seemed to turn into a twelve-foot alligator before my very eyes.

  • In a memorable episode of Barney Miller, the detectives suffer interesting effects from munching a batch of brownies made by Wojo's current girlfriend.

Fish: The best I've felt in years and it's illegal!

  • In The Closer episode "Smells Like Murder", Brenda's niece Charlie bakes a pan of special brownies, which Brenda later discovers. Brenda eats at least three, oblivious of their cannabis content. Hilarity Ensues. When Fritz finds out, he is not amused, and tells Charlie to start packing her bags.
  • In an episode of Yes, Dear, Greg suffers from this in his desperation for nasal spray.
  • People getting stoned on Fringe is fairly common, but the episode "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" [1] has some brilliant moments where Peter and Broyles start tripping. They're even funnier when compared to Walter and Bellivia, who take their LSD (don't worry, it's for Mad Science) and don't react at all.
  • Thirty Rock
    • On the 100th episode, a gas leak causes Jack to hallucinate alternate versions of himself.
    • Inverted in the Live Episode, where the different look and the Laugh Track are explained by Jack's lack of alcohol.
  • Pierce descends into one complete with mocking animated skeletons in Community episode "Introduction to Statistics"
  • Two and A Half Men - Charlie smokes pharmaceutical weed and sees hallucinations of various ex-girlfriends. Because everyone knows that's what happens when you smoke weed.
    • Well, pharmaceutical weed plus a low tolerance could lead to mild hallucinations, but nothing like seeing your ex girlfriends.
  • Invoked verbally but averted in CSI season 12, in response to DB Russell's personal mushroom garden in his office. They are not hallucinogenic, but he's gotten at least one joke about it already.

Russell: Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. Who saw him die? I, said the fly, with my little eye...
Brass: Those 'shrooms in your office aren't medicinal, are they?

    • However, a hallucination-caused death happened at least once, it was the guy who got drunk on peyote or something like it during a party in the desert and ended up dead and naked afterward.
  • Dragnet had its share, naturally. Mostly LSD-related, since it was the '60s.
  • In Dagvaktin, hallucinogenic mushrooms accidentally get mixed up with real mushrooms in the hotel staff's vegetable soup, with character-appropriate results. Georg dons a colander and builds a zealously-defended fortress out of food boxes, pot plants and cutlery; Gugga grabs her shotgun and goes hunting for imaginary crows in the guests' bedrooms, and Daníel strips naked and smothers himself in jam, insisting that 'wearing the jam takes away all my fears'.
  • Red Dwarf features an after-the-fact example in the past bits of "Stasis Leak", past Rimmer is convinced that his future self's holographic head sticking out of the table is a hallucination (same with the captain in a chicken suit).
  • Finch, of all people, has one when a POI slips him some wine laced with Ecstacy. It's a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • Done in Victorious when discussing how Trina got into Hollywood Arts. Turns out Sikowitz had drunk some bad Sri Lanka coconut milk he had gotten from a cousin (he had forgotten it got delivered at his back door and didn't pick it up for three weeks). As all the other judges were busy with other matters, he was the only one around. So when Trina started singing he was hallucinating her wearing wearing costumes and everything in technicolor. Sikowitz believed it was part of her performance and passed her audition.


Music


Music Videos

  • The music video for "Learn to Fly" by the Foo Fighters depicts the results of a drug stash being kept in the reservoir of the coffee machine on a commercial airplane that the band is riding in, and then that coffee machine being used to brew coffee for the entire place without noticing said stash. Everyone on the crew gets epically high, along with nearly all the passengers (except for Our Intrepid Heroes, who declined the coffee) start to hallucinate wildly. It is left to the band members to take the plane in for a safe landing.
  • An innocent children song about gathering mushrooms in the countryside... or is it? Mangez-moi, mangez-moi, mangez-moi...


Newspaper Comics

  • A story arc in Bloom County had Oliver extracting the hallucinogenic chemical from dandelions for testing, only for his father to drink the entire beaker. He ends up in the tool shed, yelling about Erik Estrada coming out of his belly button.
  • One censored Garfield comic which only appears as a rough sketch in the 25th anniversary book, features a half asleep Garfield as he watches a periscope emerge from his water dish, followed by a tentacle. Garfield then smiles and says, "Man, that was some gooooooood catnip!"


Video Games

  • Far Cry 3 is shaping up to be this, in-universe.
  • Yoshi's Island has an infamous level called "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy." Touching one of the fuzzy monsters that float around in the area will cause Yoshi to stumble around like a drunkard for a minute, distorting the music and the game screen.
    • Called "Lustiges Sporen Drama" in the German version.
    • Stages 4–1 and 6-3 also have the Fuzzies, so be prepared for some Interface Screw in those stages, too.
    • Youtube user Lightning Wolf 3 has made some videos based on the above mentioned "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy," featuring Mario, Toad, and Luigi, all feeling the effects of touching fuzzy (or, in Luigi's case, a fuzzy mushroom.)
  • Well, hello there, EarthBound. A woman in Summers allows Ness to eat "Magic Cake", which allows Ness to have a vision of Poo.
    • Being hit by a walking mushroom's blast can make a mushroom grow from your head, which randomly changes the direction keys. Also causes confusion in battle until removed by a guy... who eats it.
    • To say nothing of the coffee a Mr. Saturn offers. Though really, Speaking to your dad inside a Kaleidoscope is nowhere near as bizarre as...everything else in the entire game.
    • What about Moonside? Or are we blaming that on the Mani Mani statue?
    • Mother 3 continues the tradition when the party is forced to eat some strange mushrooms found in the jungle—in this case, it serves as a rather spiteful Journey to the Center of the Mind, as the hallucinogen preys on 'guilts and fears' (the party's dog is the only one not taken in). The events were apparently supposed to be even more horrible, but the creator decided to tone it down. It's still unrefined Nightmare Fuel, though.

Claus: Everyone's waiting, Lucas. Everyone's waiting to spit at you, throw rocks at you, and make your life Hell. Who's "everyone"?... everyone you love.

    • Thankfully for poor Lucas, his next high—the return of the Saturns' coffee from the EarthBound—is much less horrific.
  • Nethack has a hallucination status effect caused by (among other things) eating violet or yellow fungus, getting zapped by a black light, or drinking a potion of hallucination. It randomizes the appearance of every creature and item in the dungeon every time you take a step, and causes just about every in-game message to be rewritten in Surfer Dude speak.
    • Z Angband has a similar effect. Monsters also receive new names so you don't know what your fighting—the names change every turn along with the appearance of the monster, and run along the lines of Cosmic Horror, Incredible Lovemaking Robot, and so on.
  • Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has an afro-wearing caterpillar enemy, resting on a toadstool (inspired by Alice in Wonderland) who blows out ring-shaped puffs of smoke. When the player hits one of these smokerings, the entire stage's colours start to cycle around psychedelically for a few moments, and the player's movement becomes distorted for a moment (Left is Right, etcetera).
  • In the game Sprung, in Brett's story, a hippie character gets him to eat some mushrooms for a 'ceremony'. It leads him to hallucinate loud flashing colours, come up with bizarre game overs, and visualise the hippie as a cow. Slowbeef's Let's Play of the scene gives Brett some surreal No Fourth Wall dialogue during the scene, even cribbing lines from other Intoxication Ensues and Mind Screw scenes as homage.
  • The entirety of Lockjaw The Overdose, a homebrew Tetris clone for Game Boy Advance.
  • Allure Seeds in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red/Blue Rescue Team and X-Eye Seeds in the sequel games had this effect- if the character eats one then all Pokémon in the room become strange green doll-like things Substitute dolls and all items, Wonder Tiles, and stairs turn into flowers until the effect wears off.
  • This is the entire point of the Knytt Stories game titled "Don't Eat the Mushroom". The samba itself begins with a giant screen of The Burger King on fire singing "What Is Love" and just gets crazier from there.
  • The Fairy Ring in Quest for Glory I is comprised of Magic Mushrooms. Consuming them will cause the screen to change colors, with descriptions of the hallucinations ("Wow! Look at all the nice paisley horses! Not to mention the beautiful neon sky."). The first time you eat the mushrooms, you're warned not to repeat it. If you do, the hallucinations resume, and "your mind permanently warped, you die a garishly polka-dotted death."
  • Rise of the Triad had a mushroom-shaped "power up" that put you in Shrooms Mode, causing most items (including the bad guys, fired missiles, and spring pads) to have a pulsating glow and the player's view to rapidly shift up and down. One of the game's secret levels was a big room filled with nothing but shrooms and spring pads, leading to some whacked out bouncy fun.
  • Fallout 3's expansion, "Point Lookout", features an encounter with a psychoactive fruit which explodes in the player's face... followed by having a chunk of the player character's brain removed while the player is hallucinating.
    • To say nothing about Vault 106 in the base game, whose experiment was to pump hallucinatory drugs into the air system and observe how the occupants reacted; said reaction was to go insane and murder everyone else inside the vault. If the Lone Wanderer goes inside for a length of time, he starts to experience the effects firsthand, which manifest as unusual messages to himself on the computers and multiple illusions of his father and childhood friend.
  • The first Max Payne game has two levels like this, once when Mona knocks him out with some unidentified substance in a drink, and later when the Corrupt Corporate Executive Big Bad forcibly administers an overdose of V.
  • In Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, when you take the adrenaline pills everything becomes very slow and everyone speaks in low, distorted voices. Also, the player becomes super strong and fast. One mission in Vice City starts after you encounter a side character's boomshine. You have to drive him to the hospital while very, very drunk. Something similar happens in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, where you end up driving a van under the influence of weed after helping the van's owner torch an entire field of weed with a flamethrower.
  • In King's Quest VI, the character drinks a fake suicide potion, and hallucinates a key clue to the endgame.
  • In Deus Ex, you can make the main character smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol and even do drugs. The cigarettes make him cough and lose health. The booze actually increases health a little, but makes vision worse. The drug (called "Zyme") has no effect on health.
  • In Saints Row 2, the Boss is doped to the gills for a meeting with the Sons of Samedi, and has to survive the mission under the influence, which here means "with blurry and tilted vision". It's also possible to drink alcohol (same result as the drug from the above mission) and smoke blunts (screen is covered in fog) whenever you want, though taking more than two at a time tends to hinder the player character in addition to the Interface Screw (too many blunts causes the Boss to randomly stop and cough up smoke, for example).
  • In Donkey Kong Country Returns, DK and Diddy find a magic floating golden banana in the final level. After digging in, they find themselves in mysterious land in the sky full of floating fruit platforms and koalas that are also half helicopter. One might argue that this wasn't a hallucination and they were actually transported to a land where giant cherries are actually proximity bombs. One might also be a little naive.
  • Golden Sun: Dark Dawn includes an entire psychedelic dungeon, the "Phantasmal Bog", that is reached by having a collective bad trip on Dream Leaf harvested from a sickly tree. Once the tree is healthy, you can buy some Dream Leaf to use in the closed-up Border Town, causing a hallucination that the town is open, allowing you to reach a summon tablet that is otherwise completely inaccessible.
  • The Lord of the Rings Online has at least two examples of this trope:
    • In the Water Works area, there are some giant toads who produce secretions that cause the player's character to have "hallucinations," wherein the screen colors change and there are other visual effects. And you don't even have to lick the toads. (In addition, the mouseover text for the debuff icon says something like "You can taste rectangles and smell the color magenta.")
    • One of the quests in Evendim involves sneaking a mixture into some giants' cookpot, after which they start hallucinating that millions of spiders are coming out of the woods.
  • Bug! Too! has the final stages of the game, Cicada Night Fever. The entire level is one hell of an acid trip- the platforms are unnaturally colourful, the background contains Dali's clocks, you fight toads (from the first game) and floating Cheshire Cats, and the Final Boss? Three of that smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland... while deadly popcorn rains down from the sky.
  • Aquaria features the Rainbow Mushroom...which doesn't do anything on it's own, but mixed into Hot Soup it makes Rainbow Soup, whose effect is listed as "trippy". What this gets you is the same Interface Screw animation as a faceful of squid ink, but in rainbow colors. For about thirty seconds, anyway; after that the colors darken almost to black as Naija experiences the crash that almost never comes with this trope, letting out pained gasps at an alarming rate until the soup wears off after another thirty seconds or so.
  • In Hatoful Boyfriend, Anghel Higure has a condition causing his body to produce hallucinogenic pheremones... to which he is himself not immune. His Cloudcuckoolander behavior is because he is on a permanent acid trip.


Web Comics

"But this is just herbal tea..."
"I know, I just wanted to draw all this cool stuff."

Standing Stone: Used to be the druid came to us for advice, but somewhere along the line they got confused and started talking to ordinary rocks.
Ayne: Didn't they notice those didn't talk back?
Standing Stone: You'd be amazed at what talks back when you eat the wrong mushrooms.

Cop: …said he was trying to save a princess… and that he was being chased by turtles.

Web Original


Western Animation

  • Beavis and Butthead: Excessive caffeine or sugar was enough to turn Beavis into his psychotic alter ego "Cornholio". Likewise, see The Movie above.
  • In the episode "Raisin The Stakes" on Clone High, an anti-drug speaker tricks the entire high school into believing that raisins are a hallucinogen. Many drug montages take place of varying degrees of weirdness. (The entire episode is a rock opera ripped off from The Wall and The Amazing Technocolor Dreamcoat with traces of Godspell and Hair (theatre) - very 60's-70's).)
  • The Simpsons
    • "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer": After eating some of "the Merciless Peppers of Quetzlzacatenango" at a chili cookoff, Homer starts hallucinating wildly (which Marge mistakes for Homer breaking his promise about getting drunk) and goes on a journey to find his soulmate.

Chief Wiggum: "The merciless peppers of Quetzalzacatenango! Grown deep in the jungle primeval by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum."

    • In another episode, Homer eats a box of ancient bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) ("I think it came with the house," comments Marge) on a dare from Bart, which causes him to have an "antacid trip" (and Bart to win $50).
    • In the episode where Homer becomes a hippie, Flanders starts seeing Grateful Dead-type bears and Rolling Stones-type lips after drinking carrot juice laced with peyote. Barney sees a fanged monstrosity from the same drink, but is quickly saved by a beer and his friend Stampy, the pink elephant, Grampa and Jasper begin giggling like Beavis and Butthead (while sitting on a park bench in the same manner as Beavis and Butthead on their couch) and Willy sees a beautiful woman whom he starts kissing (which is actually a rake and the kissing is actually Groundskeeper Willy scraping his face with the tines of the rake).
    • In "Homer Loves Flanders," Homer comments that Shelbyville threatened to spike Springfield's water supply after Springfield burned down their city hall, but they didn't have the guts. Cut to Marge drinking some water in the kitchen. Sitar music suddenly plays and Marge comments that the walls are melting again. A cooked turkey pops out of the oven and flies away.
    • In "Selma's Choice", Bart dares Lisa to drink some of the water from a boat ride at Duff Gardens (which is so polluted, it doesn't really look like water anymore). Once she does, she starts to hallucinate (starting with the Dutch dolls on the "Little Land of Duff" ride receding down a dark, endless hallway), becomes paranoid, tries to whack Bart and Aunt Selma with a boat oar, stumbles around the Duff Lite Parade commenting on how she can "see the music," and is found hours later after security saw her swimming naked in the Fermentarium, clad in only a towel and declaring herself, "The Lizard Queen."
    • And then, when Homer starts smoking medicinal weed, he opens his bathroom's door with a 60's-style happy face, grabs a razor with a happy face, sees rainbows coming out of his beard, and then he gets on his car (with a happy face too!), under a pink sky and the smiling sun, his car takes off, and he drives away—all with Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven" playing.
    • There was also a subversion: in the chapter where Homer becomes a missionary, he starts licking hallucinogenic toads out of sheer boredom; however, the only thing we can see is his dilated pupils and his unusual reactions.
    • And then there's the episode where Ned opens a Christian theme park. He erects a statue of his late wife (the park was a lifelong dream of hers), and people who stand in front of it are hit with a vision of their idea of heaven, while onlookers see them writhing on the ground speaking in tongues. Everyone thinks it's something truly spiritual, until Ned discovers a gas leak near the statue and that people were just "Getting goofy off the gas fumes."
    • There's also an episode where Bart finds a twenty-dollar bill. He and Milhouse buy an "all-syrup Squishee," which causes them to hallucinate and appear drunk.
    • Also, in the episode "Homerpalooza" Otto hallucinates that his shoes are talking to him.

"Don't worry, I won't hurt you. I only want you to have some fun."

    • In "Bart Gets an Elephant", after sniffing some ammonia fumes Homer hallucinates that the cleaning mascots come to life and start dancing around causing him to laugh. Suddenly they spring out and attack him causing him to scream, Marge hears this and tells him to stop screaming so loud.
    • In "Team Homer", Mr. Burns sees Homer as the Pillsbury Dough-boy while under the influence of ether, and since he's a big fan of his Homer uses this to get money for his bowling team from Mr. Burns. Burns then sees Hans Moleman as Lucky the Leprechaun, and tries to kill him and steal his brain to figure out the secret of his Lucky Charms.
    • In "King of the Hill", when Homer is climbing the Murderhorn mountain, he starts feeling light-headed from the thinning atmosphere, then eventually says "Why should I climb when I can just take the escalator?" He then hallucinates that he's riding up the mountain on an escalator dressed in a suit and top hat, then leaping from peak to peak on the back of a blue mountain goat, then getting an elevator ride from the Abominable Snow-Monster from Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer. Back in reality, he's actually tumbling down the mountain all cut up with a big smile on his face.
    • In "Last Exit To Springfield" Lisa under the influence of laughing gas hallucinates that she is flying through the air and comes across a parody of Pepperland from Yellow Submarine and meets The Beatles in a purple submarine.
  • Futurama
    • There's an episode where Bender starts "abusing electricity", which is apparently that universe's robot-drug. Not only is it very addictive, but the first time he takes a hit he has a wonderful but brief hallucinatory trip.
    • Also, in the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox", the crew vists Universe 420, a universe where everyone is on drugs. We don't get to explicitly see anything there, but the main-story of the episode is mind-trippy enough in its own right. As Fry says about the situation: "It's like that drug trip I saw in that movie while I was on that drug trip."
  • In an episode of Rocko's Modern Life, Rocko and Filburt get "hangovers" from too much ice cream at Filburt's bachelor party and Heffer acts drunk. Another example is the Halloween episode "Sugar Frosted Frights", where Filburt eats Halloween candy for the first time and enters a sugar-rush-induced fantasy inspired by the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment from Disney/Fantasia.
  • In the Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Partying is Such Sweet Soiree", Bloo tricks Mac into eating sugar at a party, and the resulting sugar rush makes Mac act like he's on ecstasy.
  • Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, "Rock and Roe": After eating too much bad sushi at a cheap seafood restaurant, Ami and Yumi start hallucinating.
  • Jason from Home Movies indulges in too much candy at Fenton's birthday party and begins behaving like a combative drunk. A concerned Melissa calls a cab for him.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender
    • The entirety of the episode "Nightmares and Daydreams". Note to people with no knowledge of why one should not stay up for three days: sleep deprivation makes your brain self-produce DMT. The dreams that cause said sleep deprevation are pretty weird as well (Aang as a Badass Longcoat with Anime Hair?). The crazy comes to a head when Aang imagines that Momo, a tiny Team Pet, is talking to him. This is followed by Appa, who is a giant, six-legged bison, talking along with the other characters as if it's perfectly normal, to the point where Aang doesn't notice. After Momo and Appa suddenly don Samurai garb and start fighting with swords, Aang declares his desire to dive under a cold waterfall.
    • "Drink Cactus juice; it'll quench you; nothing's quenchier, it's the quenchiest" and "It's a giant mushroom! MAYBE IT'S FRIENDLY!!"
  • Toot, Wooldor and Xandir have one of these moments in Drawn Together by licking Ling-Ling repeatedly. They try several things to make him "dis-ap-poin-ted", but eventually get bored and simply pass him back and forth. All three of them truly freak out when Ling-Ling's bodily secretions dry up.
    • In the second half of "Lost in Parking Space" Toot drinks the saltwater from a fish tank and claims she sees a polar bear with a scorpion tail. It turns out true later on.
  • Teen Titans
    • The episode "Haunted" features a very unfunny example. Robin accidentally inhales an unnamed hallucinogen from an old mask of Slade's. Unlike most examples, however, this Mushroom Samba leads to what most fans consider the darkest episode of the series—Robin hallucinates that Slade is everywhere and goes on a rampage trying to stop him, even going so far as physically hurting Starfire (his best friend and love interest) and threatening to "take down" his team if they try restraining him. The drug manifests every blow on his body as though he really is battling someone, and so before he realizes that bright light disperses the visions, he's nearly beaten to death... by himself. The Titans are convinced Robin has gone insane until Raven mind-links with him and gets a punch in the face by Slade herself.
    • Cyborg gets his turn when Beast Boy accidentally gives him a computer virus. He runs around crazily and eats everything in sight, while having strange food-related hallucinations.
      • That's a BIIIIG cherry!
      • You're the nasty egg people who stole all my waffles!
  • South Park
    • The episode "Major Boobage" had Kenny getting high off cat urine and tripping out into a Heavy Metal-style hallucination where there are breasts everywhere (even in the architecture!) Kyle's dad later takes a hit of cat pee, culminating in the two duking it out half-naked in a sandbox. At the end of the episode Kenny gets high on a bunch of flowers.
    • All the boys (including Jimmy, Butters, and Token) take hits of cough syrup in "Quest for Ratings," assuming that the wild hallucinations are bound to give them plenty of ideas to improve their show. They certainly have fun with the hallucinations, but the only "ideas" they emerge with are some squiggly lines drawn by Stan and the Happy Days theme song as written by Kyle.
  • In the Angry Beavers episode "Up All Night II" the eponymous beavers both suffer from lack of sleep. Hilarity Ensues as the two beavers begin talking weirdly, acting weirdly and eventually even hallucinate the more and more their rational thinking starts to suffer due to lack of sleep. The episode's even more hilarious if you watch it while you are tired yourself.
  • No surprise, but Family Guy has one too. A result of Peter and Lois smoking weed (again, as it turns out) to find inspiration to write a song for a contest. They end up licking Chris thinking he's a sundae in a magical world made of desserts and candies, lying naked on the couch together (on the FOX and syndicated version, the two are in their underwear), and thinking they sang beautifully during the talent show (when, according to Chris, they were so baked, that they thought their off-key screaming was beautiful music).
    • One occurs in the hurricane episode when Brian suffers nasty hallucinations after eating some bad psychedelic mushrooms.
  • In the Phineas and Ferb episode "The Ballad of Badbeard", Candace starts hallucinating wildly thanks to some weird moss. She ends up following Perry on one of his missions, all along thinking she's just dreaming the whole thing.

"Why do my nostrils whisper to me..?"

  • During Don Hertzfelt's "Intermission: In the Third Dimension!" sequence of The Animation Show, one of his signature cloud characters dons 3D glasses, and hallucinates in 3D! (A theoretical realm of space and time; where the laws of physics are meaningless!)
  • Similar to the Real Life example below, in Star Wars: Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker gets a blast of steam in the face in a cave on Nelvaan. As a result, he starts seeing the cave paintings move. Considering how well the vision summarizes and foreshadows his own fall to the Dark Side, The Force probably assisted the lack of oxygen. This sequence parallels Luke's experience in the cave in Episode V, where he receives a similar vision/warning about his own susceptability to the Dark Side. Not counting his fall(s) in the Expanded Universe, Luke would seem to have payed more attention to this warning.
  • This has happened a couple of times in King of the Hill.
  • Though not exactly a cause of drugs, one episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot had Jenny getting a dream chip installed so she can experience dreams. She starts to abuse it however and uses it during the daytime allowing her to see some pretty trippy stuff (all of her dreams are done in a different animation style). Things come to a head though when the chip gets damaged and she see everything in a Dr. Seuss style and goes on a rampage believing the people are Greek monsters.
  • Inspector Gadget: "NSF Gadget" involves hallucinogenic "crazy gas" being placed into the oxygen supplies of astronauts, causing them to see visions of space monsters.
  • Space Ghost Coast to Coast: "Flipmode" involves Space Ghost interviewing Busta Rhymes (who laughs at nothing in particular for most of the episode) and breaking open natural gas pipes. This leads to mostly-unseen hallucinations and freak-outs by the entire cast.

Space Ghost: DIVE! DIVE! SUCK ON THE PIPES!

  • Daria: "The Teachings of Don Jake" has the Morgendorffer family (except Daria) losing their marbles on a camping trip by eating psychotropic berries (which Quinn calls "glitter berries"). They'd probably still be chasing the spirit animal if Helen hadn't brought her cell phone...
  • In the American Dad episode "The Magnificent Steven" Stan buys Steve and his friends a small herd of cattle in an attempt to toughen them up, little does he know the cows are infected with Mad Cow Disease, during the course of events he make them slaughter the calf and only he eats the meat which causes him to hallucinate that owls are out to steal his meat (we don't see this), then he takes them to an alley where he hallucinates that he is in a bright more cartoony world and sings a Western song with a jack rabbit and prairie dog. We then cut to reality and he's dancing in his underwear with a beer pack and burger wrapper, he then orders them to cross a river which is actually a busy highway, and they end up having to save him from this. In real life he would've eventually died.
    • In the episode "In Country...Club" after eating a rare bird Roger hallucinates that he's flying in a brightly colored CGI world with constantly changing shapes and floating in front of a singing gargoyle.
    • In "100 A.D." after Roger puts some amphetamine droplets in his eyes and eats some expired cheese puffs he hallucinates that Klaus is Garfield in a bowl and Steve is a walrus in a Nazi uniform.
  • The Venture Brothers - Hank accidentally pokes himself with a drug-tipped shoe spike of Molotov Cocktease's, and starts hallucinating, finally attacking his dad with a papier-mache sword.
  • Regular Show has one of these in "Weekend at Benson's" as the result of Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson drinking a concoction known as "Mississippi Queen", the song of the same name playing during the hallucinations.


Real Life

  • Truth in Television, possibly: Some scholars of Greek literature believe that the Ancient Greek Oracles obtained their visions and heard the voices of the gods because they inhaled steam from natural geothermal vents for hours every day.
  • The hallucinogenic properties of lysergic acid diethylamide (better known as LSD or acid) were discovered by accident when its discoverer, research chemist Albert Hoffman, accidentally absorbed some through his fingertips. Hoffman realized that he had made a significant discovery, and so three days later he deliberately took 250 micrograms of the drug, which he estimated would be a minuscule threshold dose. He was wrong—the actual threshold is one tenth of that amount. Dr. Hoffman spent several hours terrified that he was possessed by a demon, that his next-door neighbour was a witch, and that that his furniture was threatening him, before relaxing into pleasant hallucinations of kaleidoscopic images in which every sound he heard became visible.
  • Ergot, a fungus which grows on some types of grain during wet winters... and is apparently not destroyed when baked into bread along with the rye, can have LSD-like effects (along with gangrene and/or dying). Some scholars believe that those who testified at the infamous Salem Witch Trials and similar events in Europe as having witnessed "witchcraft" and the Devil, had in fact been the result of a combination of religious fervor (i.e. they already believed demons and witches were everywhere)... and hallucinating due to eating ergot-infected rye bread. (It Gets Worse. Ergotamine is a potent vasoconstrictor and can cause necrosis in the fingers and toes.)
    • It should be noted that Albert Hoffman was in fact researching ergot when he discovered LSD.
  • Bill Hicks frequently talked about taking mushrooms in his stand-up routines, and referred to their effects as "squeegeeing his third eye".
  • Psychopharmacology posits that hallucinogenic substance predates history, which is supported by its common prevalence among existing tribal societies today. These tribes also use them for religious/revelatory applications, and some of more radical psychopharmacologists (I'm looking at you, Terrance McKenna, and God bless you,) "theorize" that our evolution into higher order thinkers was due to revelation brought on by hallucinatory and psychoactive substances.
  • This can even happen without drugs, namely with high fever and sleep deprivation. And epilepsy. And comas. And semi-regular, nightly unconsciousness.
  • In the 1970s, cops raiding an LSD factory in Wales failed to take into account that it had been making the stuff in large quantities for some time. The carpets, curtains, easy chairs etc. contained a significant quantity of spilled powder. They conducted a thorough search. Enough said...
  • Much like the Oracle example above, many of the supernatural events such as the event where Moses attained the 10 commandments for example may be a result of overactive senses due to such substances mentioned here.
  1. ↑ that's the scientific name for LSD, kids!
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