“A magnificent collection.” – Alexander Shulgin, godfather of MDMA
“Hayes is such a bristling and intelligent writer that one almost wishes that he had written the whole book himself. The free flow of ideas about these verboten substances and their anthropological/psychological possibilities is exhilarating.” – The Oxford American
“A sensitive and responsible approach to documenting profound experiences with ‘drugs.’ The results of this informal research are both informative and highly moving.” – The Lancet
“Intriguing. The narratives are informative, cautionary, hilarious and spooky. The uninitiated may recoil from stories of visions of goat-devils, the moon as an alien flashlight, and nude escapades at Burning Man, but those in on the book’s implicit wink will find like-minded stories of drug-induced bliss and abject terror.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“Readers will find a sequence of first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales) that presents, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last thirty years as refracted through the prism of a drug experience.” – The Chronicle of Higher Education
“We can theorize about psychedelics till the cow patties come home, but there’s nothing as poignant, perplexing, and funny as a well-told trip report. Charles Hayes has gathered together some great ones. Tripping is instructive, hilarious and — let’s face it — enticing. I loved it.” – R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000
“A classic in the growing body of contemporary psychedelic literature. For the experienced, Tripping is a harvest of inspiring moments and a reminiscence of one’s own deeply shape-shifting journeys. For the uninitiated, it is a profound glimpse into the hidden world of the subconscious and a provocation for wider acceptance of the usefulness of psychedelic states.” – Allan Badiner, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics
TrippingNote to the Reader
Preface
Part I: Introduction
The Psychedelic (in) Society: A Brief Cultural History of Tripping
Basic Features of the Psychedelic Experience
Methodology and Perspectives Used in the Making of This Book
Part II: The Narratives
Aaron: Trawling the ghost stream
Alice Dee: Highway to the sky: The road seen only by the dreamer
Anne Waldman: Point and Click: Icons in the window to the ancestral manse
Brendan: Pealing Faces
Bruce Eisner: Dazed in the desert at the end of time
Carl: The wat of the world
Charles Hayes: Eat the moment (and other stories)
Charlie: That’s when I realized I was out of my senses
Clark Heinrich: Heaven (and another story)
Daniel: I realized I was dead
Dennis: They don’t show you all this on the top of the mountain just to destroy you on your way down
Fiona: Unbridled
George: Saved by the belle (and other stories)
Gregory: Sinister toys and the Internet of souls
Henry Bass: Hallucinating the horror of sobriety
Herbie Greene: Ride the snake and break on through (or) Crashing the snake dance
Jack: The pinball machine I could play without feeding it coins
James: Hell’s den and Pan’s glen (and another story)
Jarl: An early absolution
Jason: The orgasm death dance (and other stories)
Jeremy: The schlomus: The price of a moment’s doubt
John Perry Barlow: My first trip
Julian: An awakening from within
Kate Coleman: Then the emotions started happening
Keely Stahl: The menacing orgasm that almost melted me away
Keith: First communion with life
Kenny: How can I die if I’m not here? (and other stories)
Kevin: To either die or come
Lena: I’ve definitely been psychotic
Leonard Gibson: Portals of flame, petals of the lotus blossum
Leonard Mercado: Psychedelic terra firma
Malcolm: The Psychedelic is the Center
Marcel: Is this a trap or a welcome?
Mark: Sounding the black box of the subconscious
Mark Fischer: Over the spillway
Matthew S. Kent: Maha maya: The V in my path
Megan: A blink of rabbit fur
Paul Devereaux: Do I want to be seeing this?
Peter: Everything else was normal (and other stories)
Philip Cooper: The Cathedral of San Pedro the Divine
Reverend Marianne: The vision made it real (and other stories)
Robert Bell: I had a theory who I was (and another story)
Robert Charles Wilson: The Immigrant’s landing
Ruth: The apostate’s homecoming
Sarah: Our Lady of the Eastern Star
Stephen Kessler: The initiate
Steve Silberman: the organismic display monitor
Steven Martin Cohen: A thousand cruise missles pointed straight at my brain stem
Terry: Loosing the hounds of war
Tim Page: Memoirs of an acid-salved war photographer
Part III: A Conversion with Terance McKenna
Appendix: A Concise Index of Psychedelic Substances
Notes
Bibliography and Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
