Free Howard Marks' Book of Dope Stories by Howard Marks

Perception .
    For years I had been in desultory correspondence with Dr Osmond, and in the course of this he had told me about his research work and expounded the exciting theory that certain drugs can, by inhibiting parts of our brain which act as a ‘filter’, enable us to receive a wider, more representative range of signals from the outside world – i.e. to experience the outside world more nearly as it ‘really’ is, before our minds impose their pattern on it.
    Last autumn, in anticipation of a visit to Britain, Dr Osmond asked me to approach the BBC about the possibility of his doing some broadcasts on his work. I replied by suggesting that we should make a television film together about mescaline, in the course of which he would give me the drug and I would describe my reactions.
    Dr Osmond liked this idea, and so did the BBC. So on 2 December, a BBC producer and film team – old colleagues of mine – arrived at our home in surrey, converted our drawingroom into a studio, and at 12.05 p.m., filmed me drinking down 400mg of mescaline hydrochloride.
    For half an hour nothing happened. Then I began feeling sick, and various nerves and muscles started twitching unpleasantly. Then, as this wore off, my body became more or less anaesthetised, and I became ‘de-personalised’, i.e. I felt completely detached from my body and the world, and was aware of my eyes seeing, my ears hearing and my mouth speaking as though at some distance below me.
    By 1.15 I was in the full flood of the extraordinary visual phenomena described in The Doors of Perception . I will not describe these fully, as Huxley has done it so well already. Perspectives and colours everywhere had an astonishing, mysterious beauty. The red curtains of our drawing room took on a dozen ethereal shades of mauve and purple.
    This experience alone would have fully justified the entire experiment for me (e.g. I think I shall always be more sensitive in future to certain kinds of painting), but at about 1.30 all interest in these visual phenomena was abruptly swept aside when I found that time was behaving even more strangely than colour. Though perfectly rational and wide awake (Dr Osmond gave me tests throughout the experiment which showed no significant falling-off in intelligence), I was not experiencing events in the normal sequence of time. I was experiencing the events of 3.30 before the events of 3.00; the events of 2.00 after the events of 2.45, and so on. Several events I experienced with an equal degree of reality more than once.
    I am not suggesting, of course, that the events of 3.30 happened before the events of 3.00, or that any events happened more than once. All I am saying is that I experienced them, not in the familiar sequence of clock time, but in a different, apparently capricious sequence which was outside my control.
    By ‘I’ in this context I mean, of course, my disembodied self, and by ‘experienced’ I mean learned by a special kind of awareness which seemed to comprehend yet be different from, seeing, hearing, etc.
    In films, ‘flash-backs’ transpose us backwards and forwards in time. We find events of 1956 being suddenly interrupted by events of 1939. In the same way I found later events in our drawing-room – events in which I myself was participating at the bodily level – being interrupted by earlier events and vice versa.
    I count this experience, which occurred when, as I say, I was wide awake and intelligent, sitting in my own armchair at home, as the most astounding and thought-provoking of my life. The experience lasted about two and a half hours, when the drug began wearing off. An amusing by-product was that I never knew whether or when the experiment was ending. True, I could, and constantly did, consult my watch; and would be aware of my eyes registering, say, three o’clock; but this information would be of no value to me myself, in my strange detachment, since I knew I might soon be transported to some earlier