In one study I conducted (Goode, 1970), about half of the respondents had used at least one hallucinogen drug. I elicited from them descriptions of their experiences with this drug type. One commonly reported effect was what is called eidetic imagery, or "eyeball movies." Under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs (and also on occasion with marijuana), the subject, with his or her eyes closed, "sees" physical objects, usually in motion, as sharply as if he or she were watching a film. Often these eidetic images are abstract and lacking in dramatic content; they frequently represent almost interminable repetitions of a pattern or design, much like moving wallpaper—but with the pattern constantly changing. This is by no means always the case; many respondents also reported striking imagery. One interviewee described his vision of eidetic imagery as follows: "Closing my eyes, I saw millions of color droplets, like rain, like a shower of stars, all different colors." Another young man put one of his experiences in these terms: I can't begin to describe them, even to myself, they happened so fast. I can only recall the vaguest hint of what they were like. One was hundreds of fleurs-de-lis, repeating themselves, moving in several lines. Very graceful and beautiful. An   other, not so nice, was hundreds of iron crosses, repeating themselves in four  lines at right angles to one another, receding into some point on the horizon.

These two were by far the most banal of any I saw. Most of the others were literally indescribable. Red and green played a large part in the color parade. A lot of it was images thrown on a solid surface, like a woman's body.

Another psychedelic experience commonly reported was synesthesia—the simultaneous perception of the stimulation of several senses. Users reported "hearing" color, or "seeing" sounds. The subjective meaning attached to a stimulus perceived by one sense is felt to mean something in other senses as well—is felt to be translatable from one sense to another. 

A third effect of the psychedelics reported by my respondents was what might be called perception of a multilevel reality. Sometimes these levels relate to perspective perceptions. One subject told me: "You see things from seven different ways at once." Another young woman said: "I looked at any object, and it would breathe and move and also appear from all angles in one instant." Occasionally, this multilevel perspective invades scientific realms; the diverse levels are those that a scientist might explore one at a time.

A young artist put it this way: "I was sitting on a chair, and I could see the molecules. I could see right through things to the molecules." A voung woman had this experience: "I stared at my dog—his face kept changing. I could see the veins in his face, under his skin." Often these levels do not relate specifically to definite senses; their referential location is vague. A college student said:   It was a total explosion of customary thought pattern frameworks. I became   totally open—all channels were open. I didn't view the world in my usual way.   I had a specific train of thought with the acid that isn't the only pattern of  thought—others were working simultaneously. My channels of thinking were widened. Different channels were working simultaneously—the poetic, the alle   gorical, the cosmic, the tragic levels. And I became aware of the interaction of  all levels simultaneously—you break down the weave and are aware of the parts,   while you are aware of the whole.

Another perception beyond the range of "normal" reality was that the world was continually fluid. This perceived dynamic quality of the universe was perhaps the most commonly mentioned of any of the varied aspects of the psychedelic trip. The static universe seems to explode into a shimmering, pulsating cosmos, a world in continual flux. "Things were oozing as if they were made of jelly," one interviewee said. Others reported: "A brick wall wobbled and moved." "Paint ran off the walls." "Every physical thing seemed to be swimming in a fluid as if a whole wall had been set in liquid and was standing there before me, shimmering slightly." "I saw wriggling, writhing images." "I saw flowers on the window sill, blowing in the breeze. I went to touch them, but there was no breeze, and the flowers were dead."

A fifth commonly reported psychedelic experience was subjective exaggeration, of anything—an object, an event, a mood, a person, a situation—a kind of baroque rendering of the world outside. The exaggeration may be in sheer number—perceiving more things than are there; or it may be the dramatization of a single characteristic of the stimulus, or an allegory on the nature of its essence. This type of experience ranges from modest exaggerations, some within the range of normal imaginative minds, to extravagant and detailed visions.

A coed told me: "One pillow turned into 50 million pillows—all the pillows in the world." Another said: "The mind is very suggestible. Sudden appearances of things take on strange forms. A towel falling off the edge of my tub looked like a giant lizard crawling down. The mind works faster, and is more suggestible." A young man had this experience:   When my girlfriend was peeling an orange for me, it sounded like she was    ripping a small animal apart. I examined it carefully. It seemed to be made up     of tiny golden droplets stuck together. I'd never seen an orange before. My girl    friend was eating scrambled eggs, and it was as if I was watching a pig with its    face in a trough of garbage. A few bits of egg clung to her teeth, and it seemed    as if gobs of garbage were oozing down her face and out of her mouth. But I    knew I was imagining it. This experience of subjective exaggeration of the things around one shades over into what some clinicians call the "eureka experience"—the feeling that what is usually seen and thought to be quite ordinary takes on extraordinary and even epic proportions.

Another common feature of the LSD experience was emotional lability— extremes in mood, great swings in temperament. Under the influence of the drug, a person can within seconds go from ecstasy to the depths of despair; sobbing and laughing may follow in swift succession. A divorcee described to me one such swing in mood:    It started off beautifully. I looked into a garden and I saw full-blown jewels, you    know, of different colors, and the smell was something that made me realize how    I never really sniffed a scent before. And suddenly, it got terrible, because I saw    a couple holding hands on a couch, and they reminded me of my husband and    myself, what we didn't have, because they were in love. And I started to cry, you    see. So all of a sudden, the whole beauty of the garden faded, and I started to    cry. And then all of a sudden, the thought changed to my mother, when I was    a little girl. And I got sad over that. And then, my attention wandered, and    something else was happening, beautiful music was turned on, and I heard such    exquisite things. Then suddenly I felt happy. And then I thought, My God! One    moment after the next cancels out the preceding moment. And that time is a    funny thing. That none of those incidents means more than the other one,    because they're wiped out right after they've happened by the next thing that    happens. There I saw that every incident just happening in a flash, and that a    new stimulus could take away the old. And have equal importance.

Another description that emerged during my interviews with LSD users was a feeling of timelessness. Some users contrasted their LSD experiences strongly with those on marijuana. Marijuana slows things down—it seems as though more time has passed than actually has—but the difference is quantitative not qualitative. With marijuana, one might overestimate the duration of time by two or three times. With LSD, the change is much more radical. Time, in a sense, ceases to exist; it seems suddenly irrelevant. One young man described it this way:   Has an hour gone by since I last looked at the clock? Maybe it was a lifetime.   Maybe it was no time at all. I don't know what an hour means, anyway. What is   a clock? Mechanical gears and springs. My body's pulse can tell me much more   than a clock can about how much time has passed by. One burst, one gush, one   throb, went by—that's how much. Another young man exclaimed: "Music takes endless lengths of time on acid."

Another commonly mentioned subjective "effect" of LSD-type drugs was a sensation of what might be called irrationalism. The virtues of clarity, logic, cause-and-effect relationships, regimentation, objectivity, universalism, and so on seem somehow to lose force. The contrary values of intuition, tactility, emotive communication, and organicism seem to take on a cosmic significance. A rejection of western rationality seems to be associated with the ingestion of LSD.

Users reported that under the influence of the drug they felt that an ineffable, nonlogical mentality was taking over, and they welcomed it with open arms. Suddenly what seemed important was the unique rather than the general, the implicit rather than the explicit, the preverbal rather than the verbal, participation and involvement rather than detachment and objectivity, the unpredictable rather than the predictable, the dynamic rather than the static. They preferred what Marshall McLuhan calls the "implosive"—the privatistic inward search—to the "explosive"— the aggressive, outward drive to understand and dominate. One casualty of this change was words. A young woman put it this way: "I felt that words were futile. We, my boyfriend and I, could think about the same thing, and know it, without words. Later, my thoughts were images, not in the form of words." Her sentiment was echoed by a young lawyer:

One thing my trip taught me, was able to make me see, was the essential falseness   of words. They are used for masking feeling, evading, dodging the issue. It isn't   just that they are inadequate to explain, to convey, much of experience. It is that   they actually convey a basically distorted impression of it. Much of human experi   ence is completely untranslatable into words, into logical thought. Those cold,   sterile little gnomes, words, cannot possibly get across something that is basically   emotional, physical, perceptual, spiritual—illogical, in a sense. They aren't com   parable systems of thought. It's almost like trying to eat money instead of an   orange; the two just don't mean the same thing.

No doubt many of my respondents already had some sympathy with these "irrationalist" tendencies before taking any drugs. No doubt there is a considerable overlap between many of their perceptions and many antirationalist values within some dissident groups and subcultures in America, a large proportion of which also use psychedelic drugs. Many groups shared these values before drugs began to be taken on a mass basis—the bohemians of the 1920s and 1930s, the "beatniks" of the 1950s and early 1960s, the hippies of the later 1960s. Thus the people who experiment with hallucinogenie drugs and the people who move in the direction of rejecting westernstyle rationalism are in large part the same. It is difficult to sort out which factor is primary.

As noted earlier, the full-blown authentic hallucination, the perception of a materially nonexistent physical object created out of whole cloth and felt by the subject to be actually there, is a rarity under the influence of LSD. Usually, trippers know that the things they are seeing do not "really" exist. And often some sort of "actual" stimulus touches off the sensation. Perhaps "pseudohallucination" or "virtual hallucination" would be a more appropriate term for these sensations. One very common variety is the perception of one's own body in various unusual and never-before-seen states. Sometimes this occurs before a mirror; often a dynamic element is introduced into the perception—one sees oneself over time or repeated in space.

A college student said: "I saw myself, my face in the mirror, developing from 5 years old to 40 years old." Another said: "In the mirror, I saw my clothes change into costumes from different periods of history." A young man had a similar sensation: "I could see ten images of myself on each side of me, like a tuning fork." Sometimes the body appears transmuted into a state that is both horrible and fascinating at the same time. A bizarre beauty clung to many of my respondents' descriptions of the self-metamorphosis. An artist reported: "The first thing that I noticed was that my arm was made of gold. This held my attention for a long time. It was beautiful." A young woman said: "I saw myself in the mirror with one eye. It was disturbing, but not horrible." Another subject exclaimed: "My eyelashes grew and became like snakes."

Another variety of "pseudohallucination" revolves around changed perceptions of other people. Users reported few differences in content between the transformations perceived in themselves and those seen in others. In both, malformations seemed to dominate. A schoolteacher said:  The people outside, on the street, were horrible freaks. I never saw such twisted,   distorted monsters in my life. Everyone was old, fat, or pathologically skinny,   with twisted arms, hunchbacks, bloated bellies, turniplike tubers of flesh, flesh   run rampant, a grotesque travesty of human flesh, the Gothic artist's ideal.

Inexplicably, animals figured more than occasionally in the content of these sensations, whether in transformation of actual humans or in completely original creations. A young woman said that she saw "a man with a frog's head walking down the street." Under the influence of DET, another subject described seeing "a painting of a landscape. Then I saw a little boy in the painting. A tree tried to capture the boy, and then the boy changed into a werewolf. Then I saw a rhinoceros making love to a woman. The rhino was leering at me." A schoolteacher I interviewed described the following experience under LSD:   Several friends came by and tried to coax me to go the Bronx Zoo. When they   asked me, it sounded as if I was in a jungle with a vegetable canopy above me, and their pleas were like little gremlins squeaking. One of my friends said we can   see the reptiles, and man, I really saw a reptile, right there in my living room,   a silver, green, and black snake, slithering along my floor.

Unlike marijuana, which most users describe as being pleasurable most of the time, LSD seems to elicit a formidable sense of ambivalence. It does not necessarily sharpen the senses, but it does open up the psyche to receive sensations. Our normal psychological inhibitions enable us to limit what we see around us, to "attend" to a very narrow range of sensations. Otherwise, our day-to-day and even minute-to-minute existence would be fraught with overwhelming complications. Under LSD the mind is overloaded with sensory input, with impressions and sensations that we normally filter out.

Emotional inhibitions are also lowered under LSD. Everything seems to be sensed as much more extreme and intense than normal. This means that what is pleasant will suddenly seem to be ecstasy, a magic voyage of the gods. And what is normally experienced as simply unpleasant will become dreadful—the absolute bottom circle of hell. Both may occur during a trip, often simultaneously. One of Aldous Huxley's books describing his mescaline experiences was entitled Heaven and Hell—testimony to the very powerful ambivalence most users experience during a trip on a hallucinogenic drug. Most of us do not find such extremes to our liking. Extreme swings of mood can be unsettling. Nearly everyone who emerges from a psychedelic experience, whether he likes it or not, is struck by this basic characteristic (Katz, 1970).