Hallucinations полностью

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.⁶ 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:

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 every relationship it has to the rest of the universe; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it.

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.