How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

I never achieved a transcendent, “non-dual” or “mystical-like” experience, and as I recapped the journey with Fritz the following morning, I registered a certain disappointment. But the novel plane of consciousness I’d spent a few hours wandering on had been interesting and pleasurable and, I think, useful to me. I would have to see if its effects endured, but it felt as though the experience had opened me up in unexpected ways. Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended