Unusual Reactions

In addition to occasional hallucinations, marijuana smokers have reported other uncommon reactions to the drug, which do not fit into any particular category. These are not necessarily unpleasant, but the unpleasant experiences are more often remembered and reported. Several users claim that they have had out-of-body experiences after using marijuana. "I left my body by astral projection," one smoker writes, "and saw it not as a mirror image, but as another person would see it." More commonly, smokers report having the sense of separating from their body; few people claim to have actually made a "real" separation. An Oklahoma woman writes of her ability to travel through time when she is stoned; she sometimes imagines herself in a cabin in the woods in the 1860S, and then suddenly she is transported back to her "real" environment.
    "Have you ever heard of anybody else experiencing the 'missing person feeling'?" asks a college student. He explains that when he is very stoned, in a room where people are coming and going, he will become convinced that somebody has become lost in the shuffle. "Sometimes I feel that it's happened to me," he adds.
    Very often, as we have seen, unpleasant or unusual experiences involve the sense that the user is about to die. Carol's experience was undoubtedly frightening, but in retrospect, it is also amusing:

We were at a concert. I turned to my friend and asked, "When is this going to start?" She replied: "It's been going on for half an hour." I had no sense that this thing had already started. Then I thought, oh no, that means I must be dead. And I got into this whole weird fantasy that I was dead. Of course I couldn't tell anybody that I was dead, because I was stoned, and they'd know that, and they'd say, "She's stoned, she only thinks she's dead."
    I knew I couldn't convince anybody that I was really dead, that this was what being dead was like. And nobody was paying any attention to the fact that I was dead. I thought to myself, what am I going to do now? I considered running over to the hospital across the street from the concert to get some Valium or something, because here I was dead, and I was freaking out about it. And if I was dead, I at least wanted them to have a look at me and see if I was okay.
    Well, I thought to myself, what am I going to do? I can't tell them that I'm a professional person; they'll take away my license. But then I thought, if I'm dead, that shouldn't make any difference. So I told my friend I was dead, and she said, "Boy, you're really stoned, aren't you?" I figured, well, she's not going to pay any attention to me because obviously she's dead too, and she doesn't even know it! So I kept thinking: how am I going to deal with this? Perhaps I should focus on the music? Maybe being dead isn't so bad after all. So I sat there and I curled up in a ball in my seat, and held onto myself, and pretty soon the feeling of being dead went away.