This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

It was this—the immensity of existing things—that began to overwhelm me during the next phase of the day, as peak intensity approached and things took a darker turn. I neglected to mention that Hamlet’s claim to be king of infinite space was conditional: the very next line is “were it not that I have bad dreams.” Here they came. Now it felt like this was more reality than I could handle. Wide open, my senses were admitting to awareness exponentially more of everything—more color, more outline, more texture, more light. It was, to quote from Huxley, “wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.” Indeed. I felt as though things could easily tip over into terror. Huxley’s trip had convinced him that the function of ordinary consciousness is to protect us from reality by a process of reduction or filtration—he spoke of consciousness as a “reducing valve,” and the metaphor had never seemed more apt. Throwing open the doors of perception was wonderful, in the literal sense of the word, but without the usual filters of consciousness there came the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cozy world of symbols, could possibly bear.”