The wild part isn't just that the compound is unknown, it's how specific the hallucination is. 96% of people see tiny figures, and there's a third-century Chinese text describing the same mushroom letting you "see a little person." That kind of consistency across centuries feels less like a random trip and more like it's reliably tripping some existing brain circuit.

Worth noting micropsia ("Alice in Wonderland syndrome") shows up in migraines and epilepsy too, so maybe the mushroom just hits a failure mode that's already wired in. Still, "evolved its own psychoactive pathway, and it's closer to porcini than to anything in Psilocybe" is a great sentence.

When I was very young (around 3 or 4) I woke up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to climb into my parents' bed.

After some time, I could see a small-scale but very extensive science fiction space base on top of the bed covers, as if the bed covers were the surface of a moon or planet.

It was populated, and in motion - rockets launching from gantries as I watched, etc. I know it wasn't a dream, because my parents remember me describing it to them as it happened.

I've never experienced anything like that again, and never heard of anything like it until reading about these mushrooms last year.

It definitely seems like an odd quirk of the brain that it apparently has a ”1990s god video game" (e.g. Populous) visualization mode.

There's some neat sci fi novel potential there, though, like it being a remnant of some kind of distant ancestor with a hive mind that could synthesize the visual input of multiple members into a disembodied third-person camera point of view.