Jeremy J
On a cold winter’s afternoon, three thirteen-year-old boys were walking home from school when they passed a car pulled up on the roadside. Inside were two older boys, local school-leavers with reputations for trouble, teary-eyed with laughter. One leaned out the window and, with a grin somewhere between mischief and menace, handed them a box of Tim Tams. “Take these mushrooms,” he said, followed by another outburst of hysterical laughter, through which further enquiries were largely futile.
Inside the Tim Tam box was a handful of small brown mushrooms. Their identity, although unspoken, was clear. Their effects, much less so. A recent local news story had gained widespread attention in the community: these mushrooms made you hallucinate, possibly forever. Yet paradoxically, many adults took great risks to seek them out. The boys detoured to their nearby woodland hangout and, driven more by curiosity than courage, each cautiously ate one. Nothing happened—or at least not in the way they expected. No gnomes or giant rabbits materialised before their eyes. Eventually, they shrugged and parted ways for home on what felt like just another school day.
It was only on the walk home that things began to shift. For Jeremy, the 25-minute walk seemed to stretch into an hour or more. The sun, shimmering and setting behind the trees, pulled with its gravity. The dusk birdsong was no longer just background noise but a rich dialogue within a community that seemed to exist in parallel to his own. A simple question, with profound implications, had been planted in the mind of a thirteen-year-old: what does it mean to hallucinate?
While the pilot study failed to deliver any mythical creatures, all three participants independently reported the next morning that the world on their walk home had felt slightly tilted, but with no adverse effects. It was clear that follow-up studies would require a larger sample size—of fungi.
That day, Jeremy spent the recess breaks at the school library and, after reading all of the limited material available, submitted an inter-library loan request for Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. The school wasn’t yet connected to the internet, but with surprising enthusiasm, the librarian typed out a letter, sealed it in an envelope, and placed it in the post. That moment marked the beginning of a lifelong journey into the study of fungi, plants, and altered states of consciousness. Today, Jeremy brings that same spirit of wonder, awe, and curiosity to his work as a multidisciplinary scientific researcher and communicator.
