Journeys into the bright world

I must point out that now, even after seven weeks I can easily recall this experience. For me being out of the body and seeing and feeling another reality was altogether remarkable.

As I was going to sleep I realized that the colors and texture of the sofa-bed on which I was lying were almost identical to those I had envisioned. Yet I had been lying on my back looking up at the ceiling or out into the room. Not once did I look at the fabric of the couch itself, nor did I touch it with my hands. Rather, it seemed as though the cells of my body were picking up my immediate surroundings.

In the morning the same thought struck me as I awakened. My cells had actually absorbed their surroundings. During that ho.ur every one of them must have been opened up and totally aware. Or was it my whole being that was aware? There was no doubt but that those textures and colors were completely one with me, that they and I had somehow flowed together and merged in a larger supersensory unity that constituted a single, all-encompassing design.

Marwayne Leipzig

February 25, 1978   50 mg

I arrived at Howard and Marcia's home in Alderwood Manor at about 1:15 pm. It was a typically drizzly February Washington day, overcast and gray. They both greeted me warmly at the door and ushered me up the entrance steps to the main floor of their apartment. Marcia asked Howard to play Barbra Streisand's "Classical Barbra" record, knowing it to be a favorite of mine.

First, however, Howard explained that the amount of ketamine we would use would be fifty-milligrams. This is an extremely small dose compared to those used in surgery. He asked me about the operations I had had in the past and if I knew the types of anesthetics that were used. In general, he put my mind at ease about using ketamine. Then he took my blood pressure. I had told him that I have what is considered to be rather low pressure, but that for me it is normal. When he read the gauge he remarked with a chuckle, "Yes, you do have lovely blood pressure."

Then he told me to keep on talking as he injected the ketamine into the muscle of my right arm. This he did with such skill that I was hardly aware of what he was doing. Marcia placed a pillow on the couch, had me lie back and covered me with a blanket. Then I heard the first strains of the "Classical Barbra" record. I was totally relaxed and at ease; my friends had prepared me for a good experience.

My first response to the drug was a feeling of fuzziness. This was reminiscent of the times when I had been given anesthetics for surgery in years past. "Oh yes," I thought, "just like in a hospital. I do not like this." I was aware of the fullness in my ears, as though flying in an un-pressurized cabin, but heard no other sound than the music. I did not hear the crickets, nor any buzzing noises.

Colors began flowing past my closed eyes. Initially there were waves of palest, sheerest greens with floating islands of irridescent darker greens, changing shapes, waving and wafting on their way as in a stream. "Oh, yes," I thought, "Now I am ready to be cut open… This must be the time." But I knew that I was not in an operating room, that no surgery was going to be performed and that I was in fact in Marcia and Howard's livingroom. I was fully aware that I was on their couch. It was simply a fleeting thought as my mind compared what I was seeing with the only previous drug experiences I had ever had, which were all in hospitals. Then I let that thought go as my mind told me to be free and to "go with" what I was seeing

Next a phantasmagoria of color forms developed before me. I observed them like a spectator at an art show viewing one magnificent canvas after another. I was spellbound by their beauty. Each one seemed more spectacular than the last. The difference was that they were not encased in frames, but flowed and blended one into another. "So this is a drug trip," I thought rather smugly.

Then I became caught up in those undulating waves of exquisite colors. I became the color. I was it and it was me in some way impossible to explain in words. The thought occurred to me that color is vibration and I was seeing the vibratory energy of the cosmos. Going through a vertical pillar of hyacinth blue deepening into cobalt my mind began to concentrate on an eye-shaped patch of purple which floated my way. At the same time the area in the center of my forehead which in yoga we call "the third eye" felt contacted. "Am I seeing my third eye?" I wondered as the purple changed shape and flowed into a glowing triangle. I wanted to cry out, "Don't go, don't go!" and wondered if I could indeed talk.