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After I managed to dismiss myself, I strolled farther through the city to the marketplace. I had no "visions," saw and heard everything as usual, and yet everything was also altered in an indescribable way; "imperceptible glassy walls" everywhere. With every step that I took, I became more and more like an automaton. It especially struck me that I seemed to lose control over my facial musculature—I was convinced that my face was grown stiff, completely expressionless, empty, slack and mask-like. The only reason I could still walk and put myself in motion, was because I remembered that, and how I had "earlier" gone and moved myself. But the farther back the recollection went, the more uncertain I became. I remember that my own hands somehow were in my way: I put them in my pockets, let them dangle, entwined them behind my back . . . as some burdensome objects, which must be dragged around with us and which no one knows quite how to stow away. I had the same reaction concerning my whole body. I no longer knew why it was there, and where I should go with it. All sense for decisions of that kind had been lost . They could only be reconstructed laboriously, taking a detour through memories from the past. It took a struggle of this kind to enable me to cover the short distance from the marketplace to my home, which I reached at about 15:10.
In no way had I had the feeling of being inebriated. What I experienced was rather a gradual mental extinction. It was not at all frightening; but I can imagine that in the transition to certain mental disturbances - naturally dispersed over a greater interval—a very similar process happens: as long as the recollection of the former individual existence in the human world is still present, the patient who has become unco
Shortly after I had entered my room, the "glassy stupor" gave way. I sat down, with a view out of a window, and was at once enraptured: the window was opened wide, the diaphanous gossamer curtains, on the other hand, were drawn, and now a mild wind from the outside played with these veils and with the silhouettes of potted plants and leafy tendrils on the sill behind, which the sunlight delineated on the curtains breathing in the breeze. This spectacle captivated me completely. I "sank" into it, saw only this gentle and incessant waving and rocking of the plant shadows in the sun and the wind. I knew what
"it" was, but I sought after the name for it, after the formula, after the "magic word" that I knew and already I had it: Totentanz, the dance of the dead.... This was what the wind and the light were showing me on the screen of gossamer. Was it frightening? Was I afraid? Perhaps—at first. But then a great cheerfulness infiltrated me, and I heard the music of silence, and even my soul danced with the redeemed shadows to the whistle of the wind. Yes, I understood: this is the curtain, and this curtain itself IS the secret, the
"ultimate" that it concealed. Why, therefore, tear it up? He who does that only tears up himself. Because "there behind," behind the curtain, is "nothing.". . .
Polyp from the Deep
(0.150 mg LSD on 15 April 1961, 9:15 hours)
Begi
10:00: The environment of the room transforms itself into phosphorescent waves, ru
10:20: I lack the words to describe my current condition. It is as if an "other" complete stranger were seizing possession of me bit by bit. Have greatest trouble writing ("inhibited" or "uninhibited"?—I don't know!).
This sinister process of an advancing self-estrangement aroused in me the feeling of powerlessness, of being helplessly delivered up. Around 10:30, through closed eyes I saw i
Both the estrangement from the environment and the estrangement from the individual body, experienced in both of the preceding experiments described by Gelpke—as well as the feeling of an alien being, a demon, seizing possession of oneself—are features of LSD inebriation that, in spite of all the other diversity and variability of the experience, are cited in most research reports. I have already described the possession by the LSD
demon as an unca
The adventures described in the following report, by a painter, belong to a completely different type of LSD experience. This artist visited me in order to obtain my opinion about how the experience under LSD should be understood and interpreted. He feared that the profound transformation of his personal life, which had resulted from his experiment with LSD, could rest on a mere delusion. My explanation—that LSD, as a biochemical agent, only triggered his visions but had not created them and that these visions rather originated from his own soul—gave him confidence in the meaning of his transformation.