The Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato commented on his “near death” and “near-out of body” mushroom trip last weekend, which saw several police officers and EMTs rushed to the scene. Puciato recalls:
“I felt like I was fully separate from my body, like my consciousness had nothing to do with being a physical being….like something in between a near death experience and a near-out of body experience. The only way I can describe it in hindsight, is that I felt that consciousness wasn’t something that comes from inside of us, that it’s somehow a universal thing that we must be harnessing into our physical bodies while we’re alive, as if we are living antennae or something, or conductors of it. That realization seemed fine to me, and I wasn’t scared of my energy or that consciousness disappearing or anything like that, I just didn’t want to leave this current existence because I had too much left that I wanted to do. Thinking that I was leaving this existence, freaked me out. I just panicked, my girlfriend panicked seeing me panic, the more either of us panicked the more it escalated. I started to think that I was having some sort of mushroom induced seizure(I obviously knew I wasn’t dying of toxicity or any sort of lethal dosage….at one point I was so furious/frustrated that I of all insanely physically healthy people was having some rare abnormal reaction)….my heart was racing out of control…I was really cold…it was just overwhelming. Next thing I know I was on a stretcher, there were cops everywhere, EMTs, taking my blood pressure…pulse….asking about previous mental health…giving me a sedative…asking me a lot of other health related questions…trying to get me to sign paperwork….I started thinking I was dying…and then perhaps that I was already dead…the way the people in movies are when they don’t know they’re dead….the whole thing was just really crazy. At one point I thought that my girlfriend and I were the same person, and that I had imagined her as a reflection or manifestation of my own psychosis/personality….like some sort of female mirror of me, and then that led to me thinking that Ben, Dillinger, my friends, family…and eventually the whole world was something I was imagining in another life…that this one must be a dream or a hallucination…that I was a creation…a dream that I was having somewhere else….and that explained(to me at the time) the feeling of consciousness coming from somewhere else. It just completely flipped my reality around over and over. All of the police and EMTs seemed like they were trying to pacify me into accepting that I was already dead…that I was on the other side now…but that it was okay. The whole thing seems like it was a dream now(although my girlfriend remembers it very vividly haha….since I was BEYOND a handful to deal with during the whole thing). Let me be clear that I am not advocating any of what happened, just reporting it. People make their own choices. I could have very well easily jumped off of a roof in the state I was in, trying to wake up….thinking that maybe everything was like Tom Cruise at the end of Vanilla Sky. If you’ve ever seen that movie, the part where he was screaming ‘TECH SUPPORRRRT!!!’…..that’s what I felt like. What people do is their own decision. Drugs…at least to me…aren’t inherently good or bad….they simply affect you…and that’s obviously the point of them, it just so happens that that particular instance was beyond what I have ever encountered at any time of any experience of my life, and instantly and very clearly weeded out what was and is important to me, in a very terrifying fashion. I refuse to call it a “good” or “bad” trip…it just is what it is…people make neutral things/experiences good or bad through their perception and what they choose do with what they’ve learned from them. I would just say it was very profound, and to me was worth sharing since all of you in my eyes are a part of one of the very few things that I viewed as critically important….The Dillinger Escape Plan….and making music and sharing it with/performing it for others.”