Hallucinations полностью

Just as the introduction of hashish in the 1840s had led to a vogue for it, so these first descriptions of mescal’s effects by Weir Mitchell and others in the 1890s and the ready availability of mescaline led to another vogue—for mescal promised an experience not only richer, longer-lasting, and more coherent than that induced by hashish, but one with the added promise of transporting one to mystical realms of unearthly beauty and significance.

Unlike Mitchell, who had focused on the colored, mostly geometric hallucinations that he compared in part to those of migraine, Aldous Huxley, writing of mescaline in the 1950s, focused on the transfiguration of the visual world, its investment with luminous, divine beauty and significance. He compared such drug experiences to those of great visionaries and artists, though also to the psychotic experiences of some schizophrenics. Both genius and madness, Huxley hinted, lay in these extreme states of mind—a thought not so different from those expressed by De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Poe in relation to their own ambiguous experiences with opium and hashish (and explored at length in Jacques Joseph Moreau’s 1845 book Hashish and Mental Illness). I read Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell when they came out in the 1950s, and I was especially excited by his speaking of the “geography” of the imagination and its ultimate realm—the “Antipodes of the mind.”³²

Around the same time, I came across a pair of books by the physiologist and psychologist Heinrich Klüver. In the first one, Mescal, he reviewed the world literature on the effects of mescal and described his own experiences with it. Keeping his eyes closed, as Weir Mitchell had done, he saw complex geometrical patterns:

Transparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small . . . plastic filigreed spherical objets d’art [like] radiolaria . . . wallpaper designs . . . cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares . . . architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.

For Klüver these hallucinations represented an abnormal activation in the visual system, and he observed that similar hallucinations could occur in a variety of other conditions—migraine, sensory deprivation, hypoglycemia, fever, delirium, or the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states that come immediately before and after sleep. In Mechanisms of Hallucination, published in 1942, Klüver spoke of the tendency to “geometrization” in the brain’s visual system, and he regarded all such geometrical hallucinations as permutations of four fundamental “form constants” (he identified these as lattices, spirals, cobwebs, and tunnels). He implied that such constants must reflect something about the organization, the functional architecture, of the visual cortex—but there was little more to be said about this in the 1940s.

It might be said that both approaches—the “high,” mystical approach of Huxley and the “low,” neurophysiological approach of Klüver—were too narrowly focused and failed to do justice to the range and complexity of the phenomena that mescaline could induce. This became clearer in the late 1950s, when LSD, as well as psilocybin mushrooms and morning glory seeds (both of which contain LSD-like compounds), became widely available, ushering in a new hallucinogenic drug age and a new word to go with it: “psychedelic.”

Daniel Breslaw, a young man just out of college in the 1960s, was one of the subjects in a study of LSD at Columbia University, and he gave a vivid description of the effects of psilocybin, which he took under supervision, so that his reactions could be observed.³³ His first visions, like Weir Mitchell’s, were of stars and colors:

I closed my eyes. “I see stars!” I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe. . . . The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colors are entirely new—areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction; my field of vision is a mosaic of unbelievable complexity. To reproduce an instant of it would involve years of labor, that is, if one were able to reproduce colors of equivalent brilliance and intensity.

Then Breslaw opened his eyes. “With the eyes closed,” he noted, “one is not here, but inhabits a distant world of abstractions. But with eyes open, one glances around the physical universe with curiosity.” Curiosity—and amazement, for the visual world he saw was bizarrely changed and continually changing, as Gautier had found with hashish. Breslaw wrote: