Years before my first experience with psychotropic drugs
I came across an observation by Edna Ferber that her everyday
consciousness seemed to her similar to the heightened perceptions
reported by people who'd experienced chemical psychedelia. She said
she'd not tried them herself.
Meanwhile in a parallel universe Philip K. Dick wrote
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, considered by some to
be the classic LSD novel, two years before he took any psychedelic
drugs. This, according to Paul Williams in his extensive 1975 Rolling Stone piece on Dick. Dick told Williams he did try writing once on
LSD, to disastrous effect: “It came out all in Latin and Sanskrit.”
Williams attributes “probably” Dick's internal chemistry for the
“stunning, almost hallucinogenic sense of reality” Dick created
in his writings.
This “internal chemistry” apparently extended even
to the dizzying pace of his creative imagination. He admitted he
wrote his first thirty-some novels on amphetamines, but then was told
by psychiatrists who tested him for possible drug addiction that the
drugs had not been working. He was told his liver detoxified the
chemicals so they never reached his brain. He found he'd been fooling
himself.
