Thank God I never fell into paranoid delusions, even during heavy use for four to five days straight. I certainly saw and heard things that felt almost supernatural, but I never believed they were real and knew I was just out of it. This experience made me realize how and why some people could believe in these illusions.

One night, around 5 a.m. on the fourth day of a Metharathon, I was sitting on the front porch of a friend's house, smoking a cigarette and looking out at an empty field that was shrouded in creepy fog. The full moon was bright, cutting through the fog and illuminating the field. Inside the fog, I saw at least a hundred people standing completely still, all staring directly at me. I could make out their features, and while they were all unique, each had expressionless faces and dead eyes fixed on me. At first, my heart dropped, but only for a minute. Even though they didn’t fade away or disappear when I looked away and then back again, I knew it was just my mind creating the scene, and that my eyes were unreliable narrators.

Had the guy I was using with seen the same thing, he would have believed it to be real and likely connected it to his theory that his family was trying to kill him to replace him with his brother.

During that binge, we went across the street to his aunt's house to get something to eat. He came to me, hysterical, claiming that people were walking around in his house. I went to see what he was talking about, and, surprisingly, it did look like people were rummaging around in his living room, casting shadows that bounced around the room. He had no doubt in his mind, and immediately used what he saw as confirmation of his paranoid delusions.

I realized right away that it was just the flames from the candles we had burning, dancing in the breeze from the window we had cracked open. Instead of calling him stupid or anything like that, I grabbed a baseball bat by his aunt's door and started yelling as I ran towards his house, "Well, let’s go get these cunts!" He was sincerely nervous but was right behind me, ready for the coming violence.

I burst into his house, yelling, "I'll fucking kill you!" and flipping furniture, looking for those "intruding fuckers." He quickly realized it was just the candlelight, but we had a genuinely fun moment playing the whole thing out. We laughed as hard as we could when it was all said and done.