The follow clip is a video taken of an experiment done in 1956 in which a woman, who seems on all levels to be a completely normal 1950’s housewife, volunteered to take a dose of LSD in a glass of water, and the experimenter, Doctor Sidney Cohen, interviews her while the dose is in full effect.

She’s not necessarily stoned, but…. beautiful.

Oh wait, my mistake, she’s definitely stoned. Really, really stoned.

I find this video riveting. The look of wonder and transcendent delight on her face is pure magic. Being such a regular, normal gal, her reactions are unfiltered and simply amazing to behold.

Suddenly, a lot of what Leary and company have been saying about LSD makes more sense to me. I have always been a little dubious about the whole hallucinogenic trip. I have always thought, perhaps uncharitably, that people who needed to mess with their brains in such a radical way just to make what seems to me to arrive fairly basic philosophical conclusions must have been pretty dull to start with.

Or perhaps they are just normal, as opposed to being a freaky way-out head case who lives outside Plato’s cave and gets only occasional postcards from reality like myself.

Some of us don’t need any chemical assistance to get into a transcendental frame of mind. Rather the opposite, actually. We need chemicals to deal with that bad trip called reality.

I say that tongue in cheek, but I mean it as well. I’m very odd, mentally speaking. I don’t think like other people do. I move perpendicular to all the usual axes. I’m right here…. but I’m somewhere else as well. I’m right in front of you but I’m also millions of miles away, and a lot of places in between. I have a level of detachment and perspective that others sometimes find uncanny.

I’m a kind of freaky guy.

And it’s not without cost. Not being like the other beach apes has alienated me my whole life. And being a beach ape myself, that makes me sad. I long to connect with others, but find it hard to really relate. the world of normal people just seems so strange to me. Such a tiny, limited place compared to the wide open (cold, lonely) spaces I inhabit.

Of course, on the other side of the coin, I have always been afraid to try LSD because I figure I am not that firmly attached to reality anyhow so I am not going to go cutting myself loose any time soon.

That kind of thing is for people who have a “normal” to come back to after the trip.

Still, watching our volunteer trip balls kind of makes me want to try it. She seems like she’s in such a groovy state of mind, deep within the harmonic unity of the universe, and seeing all those cosmic colors.

Could be fun!

And speaking of colors, is it trippy or what when this typical housewife of the fifties says, in a black and white movie, “Everything’s in color!”. That blew my mind, it’s so marvelously surreal. The LSD had made her see her bland black and white fifties world in full color!

Reminds me strongly of one of my fave Paul Simon tunes.

I can kind of see why people thought that song was about drugs now.

As an aside : according to the YouTube description, that song is from an album called “Here Comes Rhymin’ Simon”. That is the most hilariously bad album title EVER. Hey Paul, don’t name your albums when you’re stoned! I’m sure it seemed REALLY FUNNY at the time….

I do wonder and worry about our volunteer in this video clip. The trip itself seems to have been entirely pleasant for her, but she has been scooped up out of her fish bowl and shown the ocean… how can she go back to life in her bowl again now? She knows THERE IS MORE.

The experiment might have been crueler than anyone could have foreseen or intended.

I’m probably worrying over nothing, though. She probably just shrugged, said “Well, that was sure weird”, and went back to her life.

Perhaps the real problem is that if you have never personally experienced the stifling conformism and enforced optimism and blinkered Republicanism of the fifties, you can’t really get how it took LSD to take people up and out of all that and let them see just how small their lives were. After all, as a Gen X type, I inherited a zeitgeist that had already made that transition. The work had already been done. So to me, it seems obvious how tiny their lives were. But what the fuck do I know? I wasn’t there.

I can only imagine the vast sea of unfocused dissatisfaction with life that the fifties must have accumulated, with so many people experiencing a material standard of living unprecedented in history, people healthier and life easier than it had ever been, and everything around you saying “This is the best time to be alive ever! How can you not be happy? There must be something wrong with YOU!”.

And yet, happy they were not.

LSD helped people get to that next level, where they could see their spiritual needs were unmet and could imagine going in search of that as well.

I can see why the forces of the Establishment and conformity thought LSD and the counterculture were such a threat to civilization. Here they had created what was arguably paradise on Earth for their kids, compared to all of what came before, and these hippies dared to say that wasn’t enough?

Madness. Anarchy. This must be the work of international communism, and their implacable need to destroy all that we’ve worked for since the War. We have to put a stop to this!

But people had to free their minds. I’m all for that. Whatever it takes to get you to that next level where you can see not just the game but the players.

I just don’t need drugs to get there, personally.