Psychedelic Experience - Dynamics of Psychedelic Experience

Dynamics of Psychedelic Experience

An attempt (in no way capable of exhaustively covering the "tremendous range" of psychedelic experience) to give "a more general view of their effects on perception, thought, and feeling" follows:

First, sensory perceptions become especially brilliant and intense. Normally unnoticed aspects of the environment capture the attention; ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time and acquire new depths of significance. Esthetic responses are greatly heightened: colors seem more intense, textures richer, contours sharpened, music more emotionally profound, the spatial arrangements of objects more meaningful. People may feel keener awareness of their bodies or sense changes in the appearance and feeling of body parts. Depth perception is often heightened and perspective distorted; inanimate objects take on expressions, and synesthesia (hearing colors, seeing sounds, etc.) is common. Time may seem to slow down enormously as more and more passing events claim the attention, or it may stop entirely, giving place to an eternal present. When the eyes are closed, fantastically vivid images appear: first geometrical forms and then landscapes, buildings, animate beings, and symbolic objects.

The emotional effects are even more profound than the perceptual ones. The drug taker becomes unusually sensitive to faces, gestures, and small changes in the environment. As everything in the field of consciousness assumes unusual importance, feelings become magnified; love, gratitude, joy, sympathy, lust, anger, pain, terror, despair, or loneliness may become overwhelming, or two seemingly incompatible feelings may be experienced at once. It is possible to feel either unusual openness and closeness to others or exaggerated distance that makes them seem like grotesque puppets or robots. The extraordinary sensations and feelings may bring on fear of losing control, paranoia, and panic, or they may cause euphoria and bliss.

Short-term memory is usually impaired, but forgotten incidents from the remote past may be released from the unconscious and relived. Introspective reflection with a sense of deep, sometimes painful insight into oneself or the nature of humanity and the universe is common; often the experience seems somehow more real or more essential than everyday life. There are also profound changes in the sense of self: the ego may separate from the body (dissociation), or the boundary between self and environment may dissolve.

At deeper levels, drug users may regress to childhood as they relive their memories, or they may project themselves into the series of dreamlike images before their closed eyelids and become the protagonists of symbolic dramas enacted for the mind's eye. Actions, persons, and images in this dream-world or even in the external world may become so intensely significant and metaphorically representative that they take on the character of symbols, myths, and allegories. Loss of self may be experienced as an actual death and rebirth, undergone with anguish and joy of overwhelming intensity. In some cases the culmination is a mystical ecstasy in which for an eternal moment all contradictions seem reconciled, all questions answered, all wants irrelevant or satisfied, all existence encompassed by an experience that is felt to define the ultimate reality, boundless, timeless, and ineffable.

Some of these effects are more common than others, but none is guaranteed to occur. Many recreational users have probably never experienced the more profound and extraordinary effects, which are usually produced by larger doses, closed eyes, and deep introspection. At any dose, a great deal depends on the time, the place, and the persons involved. Each drug experience is a unique journey of exploration into the mind.