Sex, drugs, and rock n roll as the old adage says go hand in hand. But even the most seasoned pros can go a little overboard from time to time. Enter Greg Puciato, frontman for The Dillinger Escape Plan, who last weekend went a little overboard with some magic mushrooms.

His resulting meltdown doesn’t sound too pleasant but is kind of funny in hindsight. His erratic behaviour, like thinking the band and his friends were all just a dream, freaked his girlfriend out so much she called emergency services afraid he was suffering a psychotic breakdown.

Puciato, of course, insisted he was already dead and yelled at police to tell him the truth while at the same time accusing them of not being real. Sound familiar? Another musician just a few months ago made headlines after he called the cops on himself after eating some mushrooms asking for a lift to the Armageddon.

Puciato has come back to his senses again and has written about the experience in a series of posts on his personal blog for your enjoyment. Have a read of his ‘experience’ below.

I would like to thank the six police officers, fully staffed fire truck, and the several EMTs(thanks Brian Vanina for writing to me afterwards) that showed up over the weekend…to witness/enjoy what surely must have been a beyond hysterical/bizarre/confusing sight to them.

Without going into too much detail…let me just say that it was ENTIRELY worthwhile to eat enough(way too much) of something(I won’t go into what but I’m sure your assumptions are probably accurate) to induce a total near death experience, have full blown entirely realistic hallucinations(including fake people that I had conversations with).

Have no ability to tell what time/age period of my life I was in(12, 17, 22, 29….all seemed simultaneous) and run around almost naked both in and outside singing, screaming, and asking the police if I was dead and whether or not Ben Weinman, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Liam, and various other people in my personal life, were in fact real people or part of a dream that I had while part of a separate larger reality.

When I look back on being on a stretcher outside at 3am, frantically telling police that I was already dead and insisting that they tell me the truth, while accusing them of not being real either, and my girlfriend crying and being terrified that I had gone “too far” and would be permanently insane from that point forward…..it all seems obvious what you should tell kids about drugs. “Just say…maybe.”

There is no “twelve” after “eleven”. It goes straight to “thirteen”. It’s dark if you go there. So if you’re ever at eleven and wanna go further…just be forewarned and remember that eleven jumps to thirteen and it gets fucking dark RIGHT AWAY.

But it is, in hindsight, a wholly worthwhile place to visit now and then. For the record…all I gave a fuck about when I was out of my mind and convinced I was dead, was four or five people, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. Crazy.

Responding to the blog post a fan asked Puciato if he actually recalled the events from his experience or whether another source had filled him in on what had happened. Puciato replied that his memories were a mix of his own recollection and that of his girlfriend or was also tripping balls.

I’ve done it enough(mushrooms) but not to that level. 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 it 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.

Thinking you are already dead is one thing, but feeling like you’re Tom Cruise? That shit is scary. Check out our guide to why drugs are bad for you featuring some of your favourite musicians.

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