The room is fifty feet tall. Now it is two feet tall. A strange disparity here. Whatever comes into the focus of my eyes dissolves into whorls, patterns, arrangements. There is The Doctor. His face is crawling with lice. His glasses are the size of pressure cookers, and his eyes are those of some mammoth fish. He is beyond doubt the funniest sight I have ever seen, and I insist upon this point by laughing. . . . A footstool in the corner shrinks to a mushroom in jerky spasms, braces—and springs to the ceiling. Amazing! . . . In the elevator, the face of the operator grows hair, becomes an affably growing gorilla.
Time was immensely distended. The elevator descended, “passing a floor every hundred years. Back in the room, I swim through the remaining centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure.”
Animation and intentionality appeared everywhere, as did relationship and meaning:
Here is a fire extinguisher in a glass case, evidently an exhibit of some sort. A bit of staring reveals that the beast is alive: it coils its rubber hose around its prey and sucks flesh through the nozzle. The beast and I exchange glares, and then the nurse drags me away. I wave goodbye.
A smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees
And when the effects were most intense, there came a rich synesthesia—a mingling of all the senses, and of sensation and concepts. Breslaw noted, “Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal).”
No two people ever have the same responses to such drugs; indeed, no two drug experiences are ever the same for the same person. Eric S. wrote to me to describe some of his experiences with LSD during the 1970s:
I was in my late twenties when a friend and I took some LSD. I had tripped many times before but this acid was different. . . . We noticed that we were talking to each other mentally through thoughts only, no verbal talk, tele-communicating. I thought in my head, “I want a beer,” and he heard me and got me a beer; he thought, “Turn the music up” and I turned the music up. . . . It went on like this for some time.
Then I went to urinate, and in my urine stream was a video or movie of the past played back in reverse. Everything that had just happened in the room was coming out of me like watching a movie in my urine stream, playing in reverse. This totally blew my mind.
Then my eyes became a microscope, and I looked at my wrist and was able to see each individual cell breathing or respirating, like little factories with little puffs of gas shooting out of each cell, some blowing perfect smoke rings. My eyes were able to see inside each skin cell, and I saw that I was choking myself from the inside by smoking five packs of cigarettes a day and the debris was clogging my cells. At that second I quit smoking.
Then I left my body and hovered in the room above the whole scene, then found myself traveling through a tunnel of beautiful light into space and was filled with a feeling of total love and acceptance. The light was the most beautiful, warm and inviting light I ever felt. I heard a voice ask me if I wanted to go back to Earth and finish my life or . . . to go in to the beautiful love and light in the sky. In the love and light was every person that ever lived. Then my whole life flashed in my mind from birth to the present, with every detail that ever happened, every feeling and thought, visual and emotional was there in an instant. The voice told me that humans are “Love and Light.” . . .
That day will live with me forever; I feel I was shown a side of life that most people can’t even imagine. I feel a special connection to every day, that even the simple and mundane have such power and meaning.
The effects of cannabis, mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogenic drugs have an immense range and variety. Yet certain categories of perceptual distortion and hallucinatory experience may, to some extent, be regarded as typical of the brain’s responses to such drugs.
The experience of color is often heightened, sometimes to an unearthly level, as Weir Mitchell, Huxley, and Breslaw all observed. There may be sudden changes in orientation and striking alterations of apparent size. There may be micropsia or Lilliputian vision (little beings—elves, dwarfs, fairies, imps— are curiously common in these hallucinations), or there may be gigantism (macropsia).
