What you're describing are fairly average experiences of smoking weed. Marijuana affects perception. This means that it increases your awareness and perception of colour, sound and other sensations. It may also affect your vision and perception of time and space. It can also make you more quiet and reflective, as well as affecting your ability to remember things and to think logically. Often people feel they have profound ideas and thoughts when stoned.

Weed can also cause a condition called drug-induced psychosis, which is when a person experiences some loss of contact with reality. A person with a psychosis can experience any one or more of the following:

• Auditory hallucinations (hearing voices that aren't there)
• Visual hallucinations (seeing things which aren't there)
• Delusions (believing things which aren't true)
• Jumbled thoughts
• Strange behaviour.

The difficulty is that cannabis can also bring about the experience of psychosis in someone who is already predisposed to feeling like this. This means that if you have a family history of psychosis or a mental illness, or if you have already experienced an episode, smoking weed is more likely to trigger it off in you. If this applies to you, you should avoid drugs like cannabis completely, and try other, healthier, ways of relaxing.

If you are still concerned that your experiences may fall into the category of cannabis psychosis, you should contact your local (confidential) drug and alcohol service or a medical practitioner you feel comfortable with.