One thing that helps me stay away from drugs is remembering all the times I went crazy. There were the times at boarding school, when I had stayed up for so long that I didn�t feel safe even in my own room, always hallucinating some shadowy figure in the corner of my eye. I had been playing so much Diablo II at that time that I once saw an elaborately animated goblin running where I should only have seen the reflection of leftover rain water. There were numerous occasions where I�d stay up all night with every intention to use the time to study, and I ended up playing computer games the whole time, and all of a sudden it was morning and time to shower and go to school. I remember once I played minesweeper for like 12 hours straight till my eyes wouldn�t stop watering from staring at the screen. Twelve straight hours of that fricken lame game minesweeper! There was the time where I decided I had to live outside using all natural fiber; I got rid of all my rain gear and would only wear wool for the rain. It didn�t make any sense since I was using synthetic chemicals. I was also obsessed with nutrition at this time, which didn�t make sense either, since speed is far from healthy. There was the time I thought the government was connected to my brain and was giving me orders; using some sort of color code, I would walk where �they� wanted me to walk. I�d see green and look for red, yellow and look for purple. That night I got rid of some of my most valuable belongings for no reason other than I felt like I was supposed to. I still miss that stuff. There was the time I felt nowhere was safe so I checked myself into the mental hospital, lying on the form stating that I intended to hurt myself. I think I damn near tossed an orange at someone that night! In my mind, everyone at the hospital was �in on it�, and I was really going through some sort of military training designed specifically for me. Talk about delusions of grandeur! There was the time I had a clock in my head that I had to run; it would tick in a certain sequence and I had to correct it. In this delusion, I was assisting in some sort of top-secret time travel scheme. There were the hours spent on some mundane project like trying to find a use for those stringy-things that hang off your pants, or trying to turn a ripped hoody into a backpack for my skateboard. There were the times where I�d walk through Buena Vista park and start hearing the voices of my girlfriend and some other dude in the bushes, even though there was nobody around, and I�d create this elaborate scenario in my head where my girlfriend was banging some military expert that knew how to like move her around just outside of my line of sight and whenever I moved they moved again or something. There was the time I was convinced I had established communication with outer space; I started running around to random spots and shouting OM at the sky. On numerous occasions I was convinced it was the end of time, or time had stopped altogether. It�s like this dark alter-ego of reality that pops up from the mental stretching that goes along with drug use. It is a truly real dimension of reality that is best avoided.