I was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they would often drop round on a Sunday morning. “Come in, door’s open,” I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room, I asked, “How do you like your eggs?” Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs — there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted, “Everything’s ready,” put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room — and found it completely empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.
It had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy’s voices, their “presences,” were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always; there had been no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been completely invented by my brain.
I was not only shocked, but rather frightened, too. With LSD and other drugs, I knew what was happening. The world would look different, feel different; there would be every characteristic of a special, extreme mode of experience. But my “conversation” with Jim and Kathy had no special quality; it was entirely commonplace, with nothing to mark it as a hallucination. I thought about schizophrenics conversing with their “voices,” but typically the voices of schizophrenia are mocking or accusing, not talking about ham and eggs and the weather.
“Careful, Oliver,” I said to myself. “Take yourself in hand. Don’t let this happen again.” Sunk in thought, I slowly ate my ham and eggs (Jim and Kathy’s, too) and then decided to go down to the beach, where I would see the real Jim and Kathy and all my friends, and enjoy a swim and an idle afternoon.
I was pondering all this when I became conscious of a whirring noise above me. It puzzled me for a moment, and then I realized it was a helicopter preparing to descend, and that it contained my parents, who, wanting to make a surprise visit, had flown in from London and, arriving in Los Angeles, had chartered a helicopter to bring them to Topanga Canyon. I rushed into the bathroom, had a quick shower, and put on a clean shirt and pants — the most I could do in the three or four minutes before they arrived. The throb of the engine was almost deafeningly loud, so I knew that the helicopter must have landed on the flat rock beside my house. I rushed out, excitedly, to greet my parents — but the rock was empty, there was no helicopter in sight, and the huge pulsing noise of its engine had abruptly cut off. The silence and emptiness, the disappointment, reduced me to tears. I had been so joyfully excited, and now there was nothing at all.
I went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, “Hello!” It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, “Hello, yourself,” and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy. Perhaps this direction was suggested by the spider’s opening comment: did I think that Bertrand Russell had exploded Frege’s paradox? Or perhaps it was its voice — pointed, incisive, and just like Russell’s voice (which I had heard on the radio, but also — hilariously — as it had been parodied in
During the week, I would avoid drugs, working as a resident at UCLA’s neurology department. I was amazed and moved, as I had been as a medical student in London, by the range of patients’ neurological experiences, and I found that I could not comprehend these sufficiently, or come to terms with them emotionally, unless I attempted to describe or transcribe them. It was then that I wrote my first published papers and my first book (it was never published, because I lost the manuscript).
But on the weekends, I often experimented with drugs. I recall vividly one episode in which a magical color appeared to me. I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo (Newton had chosen these, somewhat arbitrarily, by analogy with the seven notes of the musical scale). But some cultures recognize only five or six spectral colors, and few people agree as to what indigo is like.
