[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Is the trip anything like Altered States? (Or was that peyote or mescaline?)
[/QUOTE]
Hardly. It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but I recall the drug they portrayed being something like ayuhuasca—and their portrayal of the “trip” as something like a bad surrealist student film. At any rate, neither LSD nor psilocybin transforms the user into a mutant protohuman who changes color when he bangs his fist against the wall. (Or at least the stuff I got didn’t.)
Except possibly in very high doses, neither drug produces what I would call “true” open-eye hallucinations; i.e., seeing fully formed objects, people, places that aren’t there. Your perceptions are certainly distorted—colors and hues can shift and strobe, stable surfaces may give an illusion of movement, like walls or trees “breathing” in and out, and shadows flutter and sway, especially in the peripheral vision. Patterns, such as carpet, the woodgrain of a desk, or plaid fabric on a sofa, become fascinatingly, intensely intricate, as though you are seeing them for the first time. Depth and size perception can be profoundly affected, so that gazing down at your feet, you may sense that you’re hundreds of feet tall, then a moment later as though your face were inches from the floor.
In a high enough dose, mushrooms (and allegedly also LSD, although I never experienced it) can produce an effect referred to as “ego loss” or “ego death,” where reality essentially disintegrates along with the barrier between self and surroundings. Some people find this state useful and actively seek it out, but I found it to be quite terrifying on the one occasion when I, ignorant and inexperienced, took a large dose of mushrooms while alone.
If that was my introduction to a higher, universal consciousness, then that consciousness promises confusion, chaos, and abject terror, and is nothing I’m anxious to regroup with. But as with most thing spiritual, your mileage is likely to vary.
Don’t suppose you know of any drug that does?