What is the Psychedelic Experience?
The word ‘psychedelic’ was originally used in a letter from Dr. Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley in 1956; from the Greek words psykhe (mind) and deloun (reveal) the term is supposed to define something as ‘mind-manifesting,’ or revealing. LSD is the most popular of the psychedelic drugs.
LSD is a hallucinogen, or psychotogen, that promotes visual hallucinations as well as feelings of anxiety, elation, and aggression, interestingly the same three emotions reported most frequently by dreamers (Hobson 261). LSD-25, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was synthesized in a laboratory in 1938 by chemist Albert Hofmann. It was not until 1943, however, that the hallucinogenic properties were discovered when a minute amount seeped into Hofmann’s skin and he reported slight hallucinations and feelings of dizziness. 
LSD was available for investigational research among physicians and psychiatrists, and monitored experimentation began in the United States as early as 1949 (Novak 90). By the mid 1960s LSD-25 reached soaring popularity due to easy accessibility and the personification of its effects throughout popular culture. Advertisements for the drug appeared in newspapers and magazines and popular figures such as The Beatles openly admitted use of the drug to reporters and in their music. Groups like the Merry Pranksters and Leary’s East Coast following became a curiosity that consistently shined in the public eye. Their support of LSD use and promises for social and personal transcendence resulted in a breakthrough of a massive counterculture into mainstream society.
But what is the psychedelic experience?
It is commonly reported and accepted that the LSD, or any drug, experience is based on three factors; the drug (obviously the type of drug one takes will alter the result of the experience), the set, or the psychological makeup of the individual and their personal expectations of the experience, and the setting, the place where the drug is taken. The set, or the expectations of the drug taker, was commonly considered, throughout investigations, to be the most influential of the three. In an article published in The Journal of Philosophy in 1964 Huston Smith questions the validity of the drug induced religious experience and claims that the expectations for a religious experience will most likely result in one. Smith contends that “given the right set and setting, the drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from experiences that occur spontaneously” (520). And he is not alone in thinking that the expectations of the individual can monumentally persuade the overall value of the psychedelic experience. Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead is basically a self-help book on ways to achieve mystical revelations through psychedelic drug use.
Tom Wolfe, however, lashes out against the theory of set and setting in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test through a mockery of the popular doctrine:
You should prepare for the experience by meditating upon the state of your being and deciding what you hope to discover or achieve on this voyage into the self. You should also have a guide who has taken LSD himself and is familiar with the various stages of the experience and whom you know and trust…and Fuck that! That only clamped the constipation of the past, the eternal lags, on something that should happen Now. Let the setting be as unserene and lurid as the Prankster arts can make it and let your set be only what is on your…brain. (233)
The Pranksters preferred spontaneity over planned out experiences. Every member of the group strived to achieve the “Unspoken Thing” that didn’t need discussion but rather manifested itself within the experience.
Tom Wolfe describes in a chapter entitled “The Unspoken Thing” the effects of the ‘experience’ declaring, “What they all saw in…a flash was the solution to the basic predicament of being human, the personal I, Me, trapped, mortal and helpless, in a vast impersonal It, the world around me” (127). This revelation, of being trapped in oneself, forced the group closer together within the experience and changed the course of their lives towards introspection and a revaluation of values and norms. Further Wolfe explains “Under LSD, if it really went right, Ego and Non-Ego started to merge […] things that seemed separate started to merge too” (140). 
The idea of a compounding of ego and non-ego is a popular concept within dream interpretation especially that of Carl Jung, but here it serves the purpose of enlightening the drug experimenter. On the very next page Wolfe wants to convey that once “his doors of perception [are] opened for an instant,” he sees that “each moment, if he could only analyze it, reveals the entire pattern of the motion of the giant being, and his life is minutely synched in with it-” (141). Naturally achieved mystical dreams and visions often claim the same epiphanic discovery of the pattern of the universe and an individual’s role in it. Jung describes such dreams as “Big Dreams”, and argued that it is within such dreams that the dreamer is able to access the Collective Unconscious.
The Reality of Nightmares
Just as dreaming comes along with its natural counterpart, the Nightmare...the psychedelic experience comes in too forms, the enlightening and the frightening.
When a person chooses to undergo the ‘self-experiment’ he must be willing to accept that it may not be what he expects, as Hunter S. Thompson explains, “Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion” (89). Nightmarish scenes and a distraught central figure are qualities that can characterize the entire text of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The book opens with a dream-like sequence in which Raul Duke is fearful of bats that are “swooping and screeching and diving around the car,” and immediately follows with an inventory of the trunk of his car: 
We had two bags of grass, seventy –five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a wild galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. (4)This extensive list of drugs allows the reader an insight into the journey that is to come, and it ties in accurately with Hobson’s theory of dysphoria.
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