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Dancing Naked in the Mind Field – Kary Mullis

[My sitter] suggested that before I took LSD, I should smoke some marijuana because it might give me some idea of how my consciousness would be changed.  Marijuana scared me, I told him.  Everything I’d read about it said that it was a bad drug, an addictive drug – one toke and you’re a slave for life.

He persuaded me to smoke a joint as he called it.  Within moments my fear disappeared.  I was laughing.  Brad and I talked about wise things for hours.  At some point, Brad left.  I looked at Richards, my wife, with new eyes.  She was the same Richards, but not to me.  I grabbed her in a primitive way, rolled her onto our enhanced bed and felt the surging power of bliss.

A week later I said. ‘Brad’s going to come over tonight.  I’m taking acid’.  Richards said she would make us a nice dinner.

During dinner, Brad gave me what was called a double domed 1000 microgram Owsley.  He had bought it for five dollars.  It was soon to become illegal.  I didn’t finish dinner.  I started laughing.

I got up from the table and realised on the way to the couch, that everything I knew was based on false premise.  I fell down through the couch into another world.

Brad put Mysterious Mountain by Hovhaness on the stereo and kept playing it over and over.  It was the perfect background for the journey.  I watched somebody else’s beliefs become irrelevant.  Who was that Kary Mullis character?  That Georgia Tech boy.  I wasn’t afraid.  I wasn’t anything.

I noticed that time did not extend smoothly – that it was punctuated by moments – and I fell down into a crack between two moments and was gone.

My body lay on the couch for almost four hours.  I felt like I was everywhere.  I was thrilled.  I’d been trapped in my own experiences – now I was free.  The world was filled with incredibly tiny spaces where no one could find me or care what I was doing.  I was alone.  My mind could see itself.

Brad had given me 1000 micrograms because he wanted me to have a thorough experience.  I think he said ‘blow your ass away’. 

With 100 micrograms you feel a little weird, you might hallucinate, and you can go dancing, but you know you’re on acid.  You’re aware that you’re having a trip and the things you see are hallucinations.  You know you should not respond to them.  When you take 1000 micrograms of LSD you don’t know you’ve taken anything.  It just feels like that’s the way it is.  You might suddenly find yourself sitting on a building in Egypt three thousand years ago, watching boats on the Nile.

After four hours, Brad told me we were going to take a ride in the car.  I didn’t know what a car was.  We got inside this thing and it started moving and I started to panic.  I didn’t want to be in a car.  I didn’t like movement, I just wanted to find a quiet place.

Eventually we stopped in Tilden Park by a fountain.  I got some water.  It was cold and fluid but it wasn’t the water I knew.  It left trails and it was alive.  I didn’t know Brad and I didn’t know my wife.  When they got me back in the car I understood I was inside a vehicle.  I knew it had a key that made it work, but I didn’t want it to.  I was sitting in the back seat and we started down Marin Avenue, which drops 800 feet in four blocks.  Berkeley was below and I was dizzy.  I reached over from the back set and pulled out the key.  Brad took back the key, told me to behave, and drove home.

About 5 o’clock in the morning I began to come back to earth.  The most amazing aspect of the entire experience was that I landed back in the middle of my normal life.  It was so sweet to hear the birds, to see the sun come up, to watch my little girl wake up and start playing.  I appreciated my life in a way I never had before.

On the following Monday I went to school.  I remember sitting on a bench, waiting for a class to begin, thinking ‘That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done’……………

After that LSD somehow got connected with the anti-Vietnam War movement.  Drugs had to be the reason that the youth of America had long hair, wore beads, enjoyed sex and didn’t think it was a good idea to go to a foreign country and kill the locals.  Psychedelic drugs were made illegal.