You’re eating mushroom soup. Suddenly, hundreds of tiny people — maybe two centimeters tall, dressed in bright clothing — start marching across your tablecloth. They jump into your bowl. They swim around. They cling to your spoon. You’re not dreaming. You’re experiencing the documented effect of a mushroom that’s been confounding researchers for decades.
The mushroom is Lanmaoa asiatica, and it produces what clinicians call lilliputian hallucinations: vivid, three-dimensional visions of miniature beings interacting with your actual environment. Hospital records from Yunnan, China show that 96% of people who ate this mushroom undercooked reported seeing “little people” — often dancing, marching, or teasing them. One professor described lifting his tablecloth to find hundreds of tiny figures marching like soldiers.
Three Continents, One Impossible Pattern
When outsiders reached Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands in 1934, locals would eat a wild mushroom called “nonda” and temporarily appear to lose their minds. Later accounts got specific: people reported seeing tiny beings with elaborate clothing moving autonomously through their space. One elder explained that “he saw tiny people with mushrooms around their faces. They were teasing him, and he was trying to chase them away.”
In Yunnan, China, a popular edible mushroom sold in street markets — called “jian shou qing” or “turns blue in the hand” — caused similar reports. Undercooked, it triggered visions of “xiao ren ren,” meaning “little people.” The mushroom is prized for its flavor and sold openly, but everyone knows: cook it properly or face the tiny marchers.
Then researcher Colin Domnauer heard about a third location: the Northern Cordillera of the Philippines. Indigenous communities there collected a mushroom called “sedesdem” that occasionally produced visions of “ansisit” — their word for little people. When he traveled there in 2024 to collect samples, DNA sequencing revealed something remarkable: all three were the exact same species.
Lanmaoa asiatica. Separated by over 2,000 kilometers of mountains and ocean, with no historical contact between cultures, three populations independently documented identical hallucinations from consuming the same fungus. This rules out cultural fabrication. The consistency points to a shared chemical mechanism.
The Chemical That Doesn’t Exist
Chemical analysis at the Natural History Museum of Utah found no known psychoactive compounds in Lanmaoa asiatica. No psilocybin. No muscimol. Nothing in the existing catalog of hallucinogenic molecules. Whatever causes these effects is completely unknown to science.
Genomic analysis reveals that Lanmaoa asiatica is more closely related to common porcini mushrooms than to any other known hallucinogenic species. It evolved psychoactive properties through an entirely different biochemical pathway. Researchers are now feeding mushroom extracts to mice and watching for behavioral changes, systematically narrowing down which chemical fraction is responsible. Recent metabolomic studies identified 914 differential metabolites in patients who experienced the hallucinations, but the specific molecule creating the visions remains elusive.
Why These Hallucinations Are Different
These aren’t standard psychedelic visuals. Lilliputian hallucinations are clinically defined and categorically different from psilocybin or DMT experiences. The tiny beings obey physical laws. They climb furniture. They interact with real objects in three-dimensional space. They don’t melt or morph. They march, grin, and go about their business as if they belong there.
Neurologists have documented lilliputian hallucinations for decades in cases of delirium and alcohol withdrawal — always rare, usually under 1% of clinical cases. The mechanism remains mysterious. Now a mushroom produces them reliably, consistently, across cultures and continents, through an unknown chemical targeting some specific neural pathway we haven’t mapped.
Hiding in Plain Sight
A 3rd century Daoist text references a “flesh spirit mushroom” that, when eaten raw, allows one to see a little person and attain transcendence immediately. That’s 1,700 years of documented tiny-people visions. Communities in Papua New Guinea, Yunnan, and the Philippines maintained detailed knowledge of this mushroom’s effects for generations before scientists identified the species in 2014.
This isn’t an obscure rainforest species. It’s been sold openly in markets, eaten by thousands, and documented in hospital records for decades — containing a completely novel psychoactive compound we still can’t identify. Domnauer’s research continues. He’s identified four new Lanmaoa species previously unknown to science. The closest genetic relative to L. asiatica grows in North America, but nobody’s reported psychoactive effects from it yet.
Understanding how this compound works could illuminate fundamental questions about perception, consciousness, and how the brain constructs reality. A molecule that reliably triggers highly specific, consistent hallucinations across populations might offer insights into neural mechanisms that have eluded researchers using traditional psychedelics.
The One Rule
Until researchers isolate the compound, Lanmaoa asiatica remains what it’s always been: a delicious edible mushroom with one very specific requirement. Cook it thoroughly. Because if you don’t, you might find yourself at dinner with several hundred unexpected, very small guests.