These Are Your Senses on Drugs
Psychedelics and the nature of perception
Last summer, when I took acid with a close friend, she told me she could suddenly see the world in 3D.
“Don’t we always see in 3D?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “but you know what I mean.”
And I absolutely did.
From the balcony of my third-floor apartment, we peered out into the branches of a nearby tree like sailors on the prow of a ship. Every leaf appeared in crystalline clarity, while the fractal nature of the structures at each level was immediately and unmistakably clear — the leaves’ vein patterns mirroring the stems and twigs that supported them, and twigs sprouting from branches in patterns that matched the branches and trunk itself.
Earlier, in a nearby park, we had marveled at the movement of ants across a small patch of dry ground and how they could be perceived not just as one colony, but as a collection of countless autonomous units that somehow acted as one. And on the way home — by a slow and circuitous route, due to the circumstances — even the bricks and paving stones were bursting with subtleties of color and texture, light and shade.
