New Delhi: A TikTok user has shared her bizarre experience of how inhaling the "delicious fragrance" of a seemingly harmless flower ended up intoxicating her.
Toronto-based Singer-songwriter Raffaela Weyman recently shared a post on Instagram where she revealed that she was walking with her best friend when they came across a large yellow flower with a "delicious smell".
The two stopped to smell it and made a video of the same. However, things took an unexpected turn as both experienced some unusual symptoms.
Sharing an update on the video caption, she wrote: "after these photos were taken we both felt really weird and had to go home, I had my first sleep paralysis dream and the craziest nightmares, it was f...".
"The next day we were informed this is an ‘Angel’s Trumpet’. It’s highly poisonous and causes hallucinations and zombie-like trances SOOOO stick to inhaling my music, not a random flower you find on the street," she added.
Angel’s Trumpet is a genus of seven species of flowering plants in the nightshade family 'Solanaceae'. All parts of angel’s trumpets are considered poisonous and contain the alkaloids atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine.
Ingestion of Jimson weed (also known as Angel’s Trumpet) manifests as classic atropine poisoning, a page on the US CDS website notes.
Initial manifestations include dry mucous membranes, thirst, difficulty swallowing and speaking, blurred vision, and photophobia, and may be followed by hyperthermia, confusion, agitation, combative behavior, hallucinations typically involving insects, urinary retention, seizures, and coma, it revealed.
Fortunately for the singer-TikToker and her friend, they were both able to recover from the flower's poisoning. Meanwhile, the incident can serve as an important lesson for everyone to realise that some of nature's gifts may not be as innocent as they look.