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The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience – Dr Robert Masters and Dr Jean Houston

In such cases as the three just described, the perceptual distortions imposed upon the environment seem very plainly to be clothed effect – anxiety acting upon the visual perception process to change the environment which then, as precept, generates still more anxiety and also depression.

The hallucinated monsters are the monsters of childhood, the forms fear takes when one regresses to feelings of childlike helplessness. 

The symbolisms are transparent as in the house falling down = home breaking up; or shrivelled walls and shrunken body = depression and feelings of loneliness and deprivation.  Yet even such clear cut symbols will usually escape recognition by the subject.  He responds emotionally to what he sees – while what he sees are his own emotions, cast by perceptual distortion in appropriate symbolic form.