Perception

At the beginning of class we made a list of things that helps you decide whether you are in an altered state or not. This list included, but was not limited to, sense of time and sense of space being a factor. Aldous Huxley wrote, in The Doors of Perception, that when he took mescalin as a supervised experiment one day he experienced no sense of time and space. He said that they did not matter to him. All that mattered was the colors and textures of the everyday things around him that he normally didn’t pay attention to. The bamboo chair was one that I found interesting. He just stared at it for a long time so enraptured by the texture. Also, when they went to the Worlds Biggest Drug Store and he looked at the books of paintings. He saw how, even though he did not like some of the pictures before, these paintings could be so well known. Huxley was, yet again, fascinated by the textures of dresses and drapes. This interests me because he said that he did not like these paintings when in an ordinary state of mind but when he was on mescalin and looked at them he couldn’t look away. He always said that painters can turn this way of looking at things on and off or that it is permanently on for them. Wouldn’t that drive some people crazy? Their way of looking at things would be so much different from everyone else’s.

Something else that interested me a lot was the beginning of Heaven and Hell. Huxley writes that the majority of people, when in a normal state, dream in black and white. Really? I have never heard this before and I have never noticed this before. When I dream, and for some reason I do a lot, I guess I never really noticed whether it was in black and white or vibrant color. I always assumed that my dreams were in color but now, when I wake up from dreaming, I will have to attempt to remember what it was like color wise. One thing about color he mentions in the first book is that it turns on your emotions when you are on drugs. How can colors have such an effect of people and why do we dream in black and white? I had a couple of dreams 3 days in a row that scared me and I am almost positive that at least two of them were color. Why would those have been in color? What is the difference between certain types of dreams that allow some to be in color and others not?