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The choreographer wanted to do another ballet to our drumming the following spring, so we went through the same procedure. We made a tape of some more rhythms, and she made up another story, this time set in Africa. I talked to Professor Munger at Caltech and got some real African phrases to sing at the begi
Later, we went up to San Francisco for a few rehearsals. When we first got there, we found they had a problem. They couldn’t figure out how to make elephant tusks that looked good on stage. The ones they had made out of papier mâché were so bad that some of the dancers were embarrassed to dance in front of them.
We didn’t offer any solution, but rather waited to see what would happen when the performances came the following weekend. Meanwhile, I arranged to visit Werner Erhard, whom I had known from participating in some conferences he had organized. I was sitting in his beautiful home, listening to some philosophy or idea he was trying to explain to me, when all of a sudden I was hypnotized.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
My eyes popped out as I exclaimed, “Tusks!” Behind him, on the floor, were these enormous, massive, beautiful ivory tusks!
He lent us the tusks. They looked very good on stage (to the great relief of the dancers): real elephant tusks, super size, courtesy of Werner Erhard.
The choreographer moved to the East Coast, and put on her Caribbean ballet there. We heard later that she entered that ballet in a contest for choreographers from all over the United States, and she finished first or second. Encouraged by this success, she entered another competition, this time in Paris, for choreographers from all over the world. She brought a high-quality tape we had made in San Francisco and trained some dancers there in France to do a small section of the ballet—that’s how she entered the contest.
She did very well. She got into the final round, where there were only two left—a Latvian group that was doing a standard ballet with their regular dancers to beautiful classical music, and a maverick from America, with only the two dancers that she had trained in France, dancing to a ballet which had nothing but our drum music.
She was the favorite of the audience, but it wasn’t a popularity contest, and the judges decided that the Latvians had won. She went to the judges afterwards to find out the weakness in her ballet.
“Well, Madame, the music was not really satisfactory. It was not subtle enough. Controlled crescendoes were missing.”
And so we were at last found out: When we came to some really cultured people in Paris, who knew music from drums, we flunked out.
Altered States
I used to give a lecture every Wednesday over at the Hughes Aircraft Company, and one day I got there a little ahead of time, and was flirting around with the receptionist, as usual, when about half a dozen people came in—a man, a woman, and a few others. I had never seen them before. The man said, “Is this where Professor Feynman is giving some lectures?”
“This is the place,” the receptionist replied.
The man asks if his group can come to the lectures.
“I don’t think you’d like ’em much,” I say. “They’re kind of technical.”
Pretty soon the woman, who was rather clever, figured it out: “I bet you’re Professor Feynman!”
It turned out the man was John Lilly, who had earlier done some work with dolphins. He and his wife were doing some research into sense deprivation, and had built some tanks.
“Isn’t it true that you’re supposed to get hallucinations under those circumstances?” I asked, excitedly.
“That is true indeed.”
I had always had this fascination with the images from dreams and other images that come to the mind that haven’t got a direct sensory source, and how it works in the head, and I wanted to see hallucinations. I had once thought to take drugs, but I got kind of scared of that: I love to think, and I don’t want to screw up the machine. But it seemed to me that just lying around in a sense-deprivation tank had no physiological danger, SO I was very anxious to try it.
I quickly accepted the Lillys’ invitation to use the tanks, a very kind invitation on their part, and they came to listen to the lecture with their group.
So the following week I went to try the tanks. Mr. Lilly introduced me to the tanks as he must have done with other people. There were lots of bulbs, like neon lights, with different gases in them. He showed me the Periodic Table and made up a lot of mystic hokey-poke about different kinds of lights that have different kinds of influences. He told me how you get ready to go into the tank by looking at yourself in the mirror with your nose up against it—all kinds of wicky-wack things, all kinds of gorp. I didn’t pay any attention to the gorp, but I did everything because I wanted to get into the tanks, and I also thought that perhaps such preparations might make it easier to have hallucinations. So I went through everything according to the way he said. The only thing that proved difficult was choosing what color light I wanted, especially as the tank was supposed to be dark inside.
A sense-deprivation tank is like a big bathtub, but with a cover that comes down. It’s completely dark inside, and because the cover is thick, there’s no sound. There’s a little pump that pumps air in, but it turns out you don’t need to worry about air because the volume of air is rather large, and you’re only in there for two or three hours, and you don’t really consume a lot of air when you breathe normally. Mr. Lilly said that the pumps were there to put people at ease, so I figured it’s just psychological, and asked him to turn the pump off, because it made a little bit of noise.
The water in the tank has Epsom salts in it to make it denser than normal water, so you float in it rather easily. The temperature is kept at body temperature, or 94, or something—he had it all figured out. There wasn’t supposed to be any light, any sound, any temperature sensation, no nothing! Once in a while you might drift over to the side and bump slightly, or because of condensation on the ceiling of the tank a drop of water might fall, but these slight disturbances were very rare.
I must have gone about a dozen times, each time spending about two and a half hours in the tank. The first time I didn’t get any hallucinations, but after I had been in the tank, the Lillys introduced me to a man billed as a medical doctor, who told me about a drug called ketamine, which was used as an anesthetic. I’ve always been interested in questions related to what happens when you go to sleep, or what happens when you get conked out, so they showed me the papers that came with the medicine and gave me one tenth of the normal dose.
I got this strange kind of feeling which I’ve never been able to figure out whenever I tried to characterize what the effect was. For instance, the drug had quite an effect on my vision; I felt I couldn’t see clearly. But when I’d look hard at something, it would be OK. It was sort of as if you didn’t care to look at things; you’re sloppily doing this and that, feeling kind of woozy, but as soon as you look, and concentrate, everything is, for a moment at least, all right. I took a book they had on organic chemistry and looked at a table full of complicated substances, and to my surprise was able to read them.
I did all kinds of other things, like moving my hands toward each other from a distance to see if my fingers would touch each other, and although I had a feeling of complete disorientation, a feeling of an inability to do practically anything, I never found a specific thing that I couldn’t do.
As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.