Hearing voices. Seeing fantastic plays of light and color. Feeling the body transformed in impossible ways. Encounters with phantom entities. Temporary relocations of self and subjectivity. For some, experiences such as these are to be found at the bottom of a shaman’s gourd or within the crystalline lattices of the latest research chemical. For others, however, experiences like the ones above are not the result of any deliberate intervention but instead are a spontaneous consequence of the simple fact that our experience of reality is the product of our brains, and our brains are capable of being disturbed or disrupted in any number of ways. [ read more ]

Downing smokes some really outlandish “rumored-to-get-you-high” substances—such as spider webs, toothpaste, and butterfly wings—all with a very humorous but still investigatory attitude. He even tests out the noxious concept of “jenkem”, one of the most obvious practical jokes on the Internet, which involves smelling bottled fecal fumes! And I don’t think that it’s too much of a spoiler of the book to reveal that Downing does NOT take battery acid to get high (phew!), although he certainly publishes a ton of Internet literature on this idea. [ read more ]