'My 12 hours as a madman'

Katz is an astonishingly eloquent narrator, buttressed in part no doubt by four hours of audio recordings captured during the most heavily hallucinatory phase of his experience, as well as an array of notes from researchers (including Dr. Humphry Osmond) and photographs from the events. In essence, whether he was first or not, he certainly demonstrates the template for an ideal experience report, capturing an array of details large and small that help characterize what seems to have been an intensely powerful experience - far beyond how most people seem to characterize similar doses of LSD.

From his own introduction:

I saw the faces of familiar friends turn into fleshless skulls and the heads of menacing witches, pigs and weasels. The gaily patterned carpet at my feet was transformed into a fabulous heaving mass of living matter, part vegetable, part animal. An ordinary sketch of a woman's head and shoulders suddenly sprang to life. She moved her head from side to side, eyeing me critically, changing back and forth from woman into man. Her hair and her neckpiece became the nest of a thousand famished serpents who leaped out to devour me. The texture of my skin changed several times. After handling a painted card I could feel my body suffocating for want of air because my skin had turned to enamel. As I patted a black dog, my arm grew heavy and sprouted a thick coat of glossy black fur....

But my hours of madness were not all filled with horror and frenzy. At times I beheld visions of dazzling beauty—visions so rapturous, so unearthly, that no artists will ever paint them. I lived in a paradise where the sky was a mass of jewels set in a background of shimmering aquamarine blue; where the clouds were apricot-colored; where the air was filled with liquid golden arrows, glittering fountains of iridescent bubbles, filigree lace of pearl and silver, sheathes of rainbow light—all constantly changing in color, design, texture and dimension so that each scene was more lovely than the one that preceded it.

I don't believe these snippets truly do justice to the roller coaster of the soul this man went riding on that day; it's well worth surfing through the thousands of words he threw at the problem of trying to describe an experience, despite his own confession that "there are no words in the English language designed to convey the sensations I felt or the visions, illusions, hallucinations, colors, patterns and dimensions which my disordered mind revealed."

It's helpful to try to understand just what kind of expectations Katz had heading into this experience. The article indicates he'd been at the hospital for a while, getting to know the doctors and trying to understand schizophrenia as a disorder. The entire thrust of the research was that the LSD experience might share qualities in common with a mental illness that Katz described as a "corner of hell." When you're talking about set and setting, that sounds rather intense. (My own set and setting approaching my first acid trip was a lot more banal and uneducated; I had no idea, in fact, that "acid" and "LSD" were the same drug.)

Over the years, my friends and I experimented with variations on a number of approaches to set and setting, and some wound up being extremely potent, but most of them undoubtedly lacked the sheer surprise that seems to be fueling Katz's trip. That's an element that's particularly hard to bring to the table in the underground.

What about you, gentle DoseNation readers (and editors)? What was your first LSD experience like?