Dreaming and the Psychedelic Experience
The decade of the 1960s produced one of America’s great watersheds. It was a decade defined by rebellion, indulgence, and a revaluation of American values, the result of which became a change in the social consciousness of a younger generation uniting against authority. The youth of the time stood up against governmental decisions and came through with the Civil Rights Movement and Feminism, two idealisms that reverberate today. The emergence of the Rock and Roll music genre and the explosion of Beatlemania in 1964 led the way for what we know now as Pop Culture. And the breakthrough of a massive counterculture into mainstream society resulted in prolific drug use as a means to transcendence.
Psychedelic Literature was one outlet for the consciousness expansion that came along with drug use. Aldous Huxley, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson all contributed to the genre with tales of altered consciousness that border the edges of dreamland.
Psychedelic literature relies on characteristics of dreaming in order to give readers a sense of what is going on, and it also reflects theories of dreaming that suggest that dreams are meaningful and useful for personal and social development. However, the two states of consciousness differ in that the psychedelic experience is able to impress the dream-state onto reality and open doors of the unconscious during waking, thus affecting the users reaction more so than would a dream.
Aesthetic contributions to the psychedelic arts include bright colors and intense visual imagery, dreamlike tones and descriptions, as well as a difficulty in language and expression when dealing with experiences and emotions. It is interesting to note the similarities between the psychedelic arts, particularly the literature, and the natural state of dreaming, a likeness that is due to the central figure of hallucinogenic drug use.
Without the natural counterpart of dreaming the experience achieved through the ingestion of psychotogens would be extremely foreign to most people. The strong bond that was formed between humans and hallucinogenic drugs is due to the fact that people encounter the same reality every night in their sleep. The similarities between the psychedelic state and the natural dream state give the drug user the ability to keep somewhat sane in a world that is visually and emotionally changing constantly. In “A Working Paper: Memo on the Religious Implications of the Consciousness-Changing Drugs,” Joseph Havens admits that the “whole experience could be reinterpreted as a kind of dream,” except that “one feels closer to normal waking consciousness under the drug than in dreaming, and is sometimes able to choose ‘where he wants to go’ and to recall where he is and what is happening to him” (220). The experience takes place in a dream world that is altered to give control to the dreamer with which he can notice sensual changes in the physical world and reflect on his position in the universe.
Read more:
Dreaming and the Psychedelic Experience
Psychedelic Literature
What is the Psychedelic Experience?
It's all about the Brain: Hobson's Theory
Drugged up dreamy testimonies
The End of the Psychedelic Era
About the Author and Further Reading