At 16 James Fountain was a hard-working and intelligent schoolboy, but after his drink was spiked at a party he descended into a waking nightmare. He tells Nick Morrison how his delusions and hallucinations may have been good for him.

AT the time, the newspapers said he was anti-drugs. The implication was that he had been targeted in revenge for his outspoken views and for standing up to the pushers. The truth, says James Fountain, was more commonplace, although no less tragic for that.

"At school I was bullied pretty much on a regular basis. Sometimes it was physical but mostly it was mental. I felt pretty much the rest of the year had ganged up on me," he says. "It was a constant barrage of abuse, name calling, a nip here, a tuck there."

He believes it was this bullying, rather than any stand against drugs, which lay behind the incident that was to have such a dramatic impact on his life.

On February 3, 1996, James went to a party at Hardwick Hall near Sedgefield. The event was organised by independent school pupils in Teesside and County Durham, and among the 90 or so people were his tormentors at Yarm School. James had just started seeing a girl and took her to the party. Jealousy over his relationship may have been the trigger for what came next.

He had two pints of cider - like most of the party-goers he was under-age and had trouble getting served - but then started to behave oddly. The normally quiet teenager started talking non-stop, and started warning others at the party about the dangers of having their drinks spiked. This may have been the origin of the anti-drugs stories.

"Everything I did I was partially conscious of the fact that it wasn't right but I couldn't stop. I was out of control. I thought it was a bit strange that I had this fear of people getting their drinks spiked. I wouldn't normally do that," he says. He also remembers seeing his girlfriend with another boy from his school.

But it was only when he got back to his home in Hartlepool and went up to his bedroom that whatever he had been given really took effect. "I opened the door and it was like entering a new world. I was fascinated by everything," he says.

"It felt like my room but I saw it in a new light. I picked books up and thought I must have written them and I started seeing shadows moving across the ceiling."

He filled pages of A4 with disjointed ramblings. He started to wonder whether he was one of the 12 disciples, whether he was a saint. He lay there in his clothes and couldn't sleep. He picked up the clock on his bedside table.

"It read 7:03 and it didn't change. I thought I had stopped time. The second I put it down it changed to 7:04. I thought when I don't have the clock in my hand time continues, and when I pick it up time stops."

He went into his parents' room and told them he had stopped time. His mother took him to hospital. In his hospital room the visions grew stronger.

"I was looking out of the window and I saw the housing estate opposite and I thought it would be nice if there was rolling hills instead. This buzz appeared from the side and got rid of the houses and left the countryside.

"There was a dual carriageway and I thought it would be nice if it was less noisy, and then a single road appeared and instead of regular cars there were 1950s classic cars.

"I thought these things were real and I was in control. It made me think I had some sort of role as a creator, as a god I suppose, but I was still at school and hadn't even done my GCSEs."

For five nights he didn't sleep. He drifted in and out of reality. He didn't recognise his mother when she came to see him. When his father came, James talked to him about the disciples and how the world was changing. He invented reasons for being in hospital: he was on a mission from God or he was in a special academy. He was transferred to St Luke's Hospital in Middlesbrough and then to the Nuffield in Newcastle. He thought the nurses were mad and were coming after him.

He spent about six weeks completely out of it, but gradually the lucid periods became more frequent and the gaps between the visions became longer. He started to realise why he was in hospital, and started to believe his drink had been spiked. He was prescribed lithium and came back to reality. It wasn't entirely good news.

"I had been in this surreal world and to go back to the way things were was kind of boring," he says. After three months in hospital he felt he had changed.

"I was much more self-assured and I became more sociable, and I'd worked out a lot of my own problems and what I wanted to do and what I was good at. I had a lot of time to think and it taught me about myself and about other people," he says.

When he went back to school he says the bullying stopped, almost as if the other pupils were now intimidated by him and what he had been through. In turn, he saw them as immature because they hadn't been through what he had.

There were suggestions at the time that his hallucinations were either brought on by his drinking or his own drug taking. He dismisses both possibilities. Although he was not a heavy drinker, he was no novice, and says two pints would not have had that effect. Nor did he knowingly take drugs.

He has obtained his hospital records which show there was an unidentified substance in his urine, although his blood sample went missing and was never tested. He believes a hallucinogen, such as LSD, was the most likely culprit, and that the fact he had been spiked was the reason his 'trip' lasted longer than most - he says his mind was taken over. Rather than hallucinating, his mind believed it was living this new 'reality'.

He also believes he knows who was responsible. When he went back to school, everyone came up to ask how he was. All except one.

James says he doesn't feel anger towards the offender, just pity. He wrote a book about what happened when he was 17, and after leaving it for several years he came back to it to write a new draft.

"One of the key motivations for the first draft was to show him what happened, I wanted him to read it and realise what he had done. Now I feel sorry for him, but I don't really give him too much thought," he says.

After leaving school, James, now 26, went to Glasgow University to study English Literature, and is now teaching undergraduates and researching his PhD. His experience hasn't made him into an anti-drugs campaigner: he has friends who take them, although he wouldn't do them himself. Nor has he allowed what happened to dominate his life. Instead it is an episode, one he has dealt with and put behind him. But that's not to say its effects are not being felt, although not all of them are bad.

"Maybe it was a turning point, and certainly there was a loss of innocence there," he says. "But it opened up my life socially and it gave me a purpose with my work. It made me more worldly-wise, but not in a bad way. In some ways, it was a good thing."

* Out of Time by James Fountain (Book Guild Publishing, £16.99) is out today.