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).
There may be exaggerations or diminutions of depth and perspective or exaggerations of stereo vision — or even stereo hallucinations, seeing three-dimensional depth and solidity in a flat picture. Huxley described this:
I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by Cézanne — the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me.
The perceptual transformations and hallucinations induced by mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogens are predominantly, but not exclusively, visual. There may be enhancements or distortions or hallucinations of taste and smell, touch and hearing, or there may be fusions of the senses — a sort of temporary synesthesia — “the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green,” as Breslaw put it. Such coalescences or associations (and their presumed neural basis) are creations of the moment. In this way they are quite different from true synesthesia, a congenital (and often familial) condition where there are fixed sensory equivalences that last a lifetime. With hallucinogens, time may appear to be distended or compressed. One may cease to perceive motion as continuous and see instead a series of static “snapshots,” as with a film run too slowly. Such stroboscopic or cinematic vision is a not uncommon effect of mescaline. Sudden accelerations, slowings, or freezings of movement are also common with more elementary hallucinatory patterns.7
I had done a great deal of reading, but had no experiences of my own with such drugs until 1953, when my childhood friend Eric Korn came up to Oxford. We read excitedly about Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, and we ordered 50 micrograms of it from the manufacturer in Switzerland (it was still legal in the mid-1950s). Solemnly, even sacramentally, we divided it and took 25 micrograms each — not knowing what splendors or horrors awaited us — but, sadly, it had absolutely no effect on either of us. (We should have ordered 500 micrograms, not 50.)
