Gertie C. had had a half-controlled hallucinosis for decades before she started on L-dopa—bucolic hallucinations of lying in a sunlit meadow or floating in a creek near her childhood home. This changed when she was given L-dopa, and her hallucinations assumed a social and sometimes sexual character. When she told me about this, she added, anxiously, “You surely wouldn’t forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!” I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humor and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting “a gentleman visitor from out of town” in a few minutes’ time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
6
Altered States
Humans share much with other animals—the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example—but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.
We may search, too, for a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with one another, or for transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
William James was deeply interested, throughout his life, in the mystagogic powers of alcohol and other intoxicants, and he wrote about this in his 1902 book
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. . . . Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some mystical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. . . . To me [this sense] only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.
Many of us find the reconciliation that James speaks of and even Wordsworthian “intimations of immortality” in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions.
Every culture has found chemical means of transcendence, and at some point the use of such intoxicants becomes institutionalized at a magical or sacramental level; the sacramental use of psychoactive plant substances has a long history and continues to the present day in various shamanic and religious rites around the world.
At a humbler level, drugs are used not so much to illuminate or expand or concentrate the mind, to “cleanse the doors of perception,” but for the sense of pleasure and euphoria they can provide.
All of these cravings, high or low, are nicely met by the plant kingdom, which has various psychoactive agents that seem almost tailored to the neurotransmitter systems and receptor sites in our brains. (They are not, of course; they have evolved to deter predators or sometimes to attract other animals to eat a plant’s fruit and disseminate its seeds. Nevertheless, one cannot repress a feeling of wonder that there should be so many plants capable of inducing hallucinations or altered brain states of many kinds.)28
