The walls of the room seem to glide together; the ceiling comes down; the floor ascends. Finally, he feels that he is being crushed and that all of his senses are being blotted out in the ensuing darkness. In one proving a crisis of some catastrophe by water appeared at the end of every vision, with the recurring feeling of drowning or being in imminent peril of doing so.
Suspicious imaginings, resembling paranoid states, are also frequent: he thinks some men have been bribed to kill him; the sound of people whispering in a room makes him think that they are plotting something.
Sometimes sensations of immobility and stony hardness come over the patient. He suddenly feels as if he were a marble statue, cold all over, and unable to move. His brain seems to have been changed into marble, as have his eyes. More frequent, however, is the sense of levitation. He thinks he is weightless, that his body is transparent and the light can shine through it, that he can look inside his body. He has the sensation that the body or some part of it is elevated in the air and that he is starting to float or fly; that he can fly like a bird. He loses the sense of existence of his own body; he feels as if he were suspended in the air; he believes he is transformed into a cylinder or a sphere. He has the sensation of leaving the body, often accompanied by a ‘double consciousness’. It is as if the soul is separate from the body and looking down upon it, as if the body is too small for the soul and has to be expanded to suitable proportions, or as if he is split in two from head to foot and has become two people.
The out-of-body experiences of Cannabis may be pleasant, especially in the beginning stages of the condition (the notion of ‘beginning stages’ used here and later refers to the development of the condition and the drug’s early stages of action, and should not be confused with the two fundamental types of mental pathology mentioned earlier). The drug produces a state of euphoria, often with