LSD x1: Not Meeting Aliens, Becoming One
Reinterpreting the Psychedelic Experience
About LSD x :
LSD x is a “Dangerous Ideas” Series on Reinterpreting the Psychedelic Experience — presenting vignettes that enhance our ability to think and reflect about ourselves and our environment, to amplify our creative potential.
This series is brought to you buy Dane’s Patreon patrons. Please consider contributing, today!
Part One: Suddenly, Everything Old is New.
Imagine looking at houses in an old suburban neighborhood where the houses aren't too far apart, and are each unique. Picture the diversity of architectural and aesthetic styles, colors and accents and building materials.
Now, imagine seeing them for the first time ever, today, never having known the concept of a "house."
I don’t expect anyone that strolled their eyes right along to this next paragraph to have pulled that thought experiment off. It's not easy to set everything you know aside at the whims of some creative writer, and even with time for contemplation, you probably require an exceptionally visual/creative mind to envision it. So let me try to take you into the experience.
"What the hell is that cloth awning?" you wonder wordlessly, without any reference to concepts like “cloth” or “awning,” noting how the stripes are defying logic, being simultaneously wobbly and rigid, and even at times slithering around like 2D snakes.
You forget the awning, then, because the green wooden shutters demand your attention and stupefy you. You’re completely unaware of the developmental history of home weather protection and how shutters were once used for reinforcing a shelter from strong winds and debris, and too unaware of how advancements like tempered glass and double-paned windows made functional shutters obsolete. You have no point of reference.
How could you determine that what you're looking at are mere ornamental fixtures that exist solely for the aesthetic enjoyment of the homeowner and those passersby who appreciate their sense of style? You cannot.
To you, the newborn alien, those green shutters could be primed to emanate a fatal blast of energy—some ultimate self-defense tool of a wild animal—and there is no telling whether the magnificent and gargantuan beast they belong to might uproot itself at any moment, open its many oculi, and send their death rays upon you in a stroboscopic assault.
How many feet lie beneath the ground where this beast is planted?
For what slice of eternity does it lie in wait for its perfect victim?
Are you its prey?
Or, in its benevolence, how shall it reward the kindness of strangers?
Can you break splinters off the mailbox that you can crush and brew into medicinal teas? (Would that be so ‘far out’ to an alien, when your own human forebears once plucked mushrooms off animal feces and found their minds warped forty-five minutes later upon eating them?) Maybe you’ll discover that the flap on the container atop the post can be opened, and see that it is hollow and bears thin, rectangular fruit.
How long it will take you to finally discover that these fruit are not grown from within, but placed inside from without, or that they are really envelopes containing letters and bills and spam, is unknown.
Every detail is unexplainable, every question unanswerable. There is no history of the thing in your mind. No childhood memories to call upon for reference. There is no knowledge or intuition as to whether this entity is sentient, simple, or lame.
In theory, you could never, ever know that this ‘thing’ was a house. It is completely alien to you, made of materials that do not exist on your homeworld.
It is alien to you, because you
are alien
to it.
-Fin-
I hope that gives you a good think!
LSD x2 takes us from the ‘far out’ to the ‘freak out’:
Excerpt: “We’ve forgotten almost entirely those years of childhood when everything needed explaining, and gone too are memories of those earliest years when all we did or could do was cry for help. Now, despite those experiences, we may find a much smaller dose of confusion wholly disconcerting.”
Please share “Dangerous Ideas” with your friends, and let them know what you’re getting out of it!
Thanks for being here,
Dane Curley
As an art major, I appreciated this essay. Perspective is just that, a different way to view to obvious and mundane. Have a great weekend.