review by Brian Charles Clark
Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures
edited by Charles Hayes
Publisher: Penguin, 2000
Wild colors. Weird sounds. Sensations of the presence of the divine. An acute feeling of the presence of a demon. The range of altered states of consciousness covers a gamut as wide and varied as the people who have taken LSD, DMT or any of the other psychedelic substances. And all those experiences are here, in Charles Hayes’ eye-opening, wonderful, and lovingly edited anthology.
The basic premise of Tripping is simple. Instead of writing yet another tome about how great acid, ecstasy and all the rest are—a project that is inevitably subjective, no matter how thoughtful the author—go out and ask the folks who have taken the drugs what they experienced. What we get, then, is the varieties of psychedelic experience, a kind of informal ethnography. Read the rest of this entry »
