When the Impossible Happens Read Online Free PDF Page A

“experimental psychoses” could provide interesting insights into the causes of naturally occurring psychotic states, particularly schizophrenia, the most enigmatic of psychiatric disorders.

    The insert from Sandoz accompanying the sample of LSD also contained a little note that profoundly changed my personal and professional life. It suggested that this substance could be used as a revolutionary, unconventional teaching tool for mental health professionals working with psychotic patients. The possibility of experiencing a reversible “experimental psychosis” seemed to provide a unique opportunity for psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, and students of psychiatry to gain intimate personal knowledge of the inner world of their clients and make it possible to understand them better, to be able to communicate with them more effectively, and as a result, to treat them more successfully.

    I was extremely excited about such an extraordinary training opportunity and asked my preceptor, Dr. George Roubíček, for an LSD session. Unfortunately, the staff of the psychiatric clinic decided that, for a variety of reasons, students would not be accepted as volunteers. However, Dr. Roubíček was too busy to spend hours at a time in the LSD sessions of his experimental subjects and needed help. There were no objections to my supervising psychedelic sessions of others and keeping the records of their experiences. I thus had sat in on the LSD sessions of many Czech psychiatrists and psychologists, prominent artists, and other interested people before I myself was qualified as an experimental subject. By the time I graduated from the medical school and qualified for a session, my appetite had been repeatedly whetted by fantastic accounts of the experiences of others that I had witnessed.

    In the fall of 1956, after my graduation from medical school, I was finally able to have my own session. Dr. Roubíček’s area of special interest was research of the electric activity of the brain. One of the conditions for participating in the LSD study was to agree to have an EEG recording taken before, during, and after the session. In addition, at the time of my session, he was particularly fascinated by what was called “driving” or “entraining” the brain waves. This involved exposure to various frequencies of flashing stroboscopic light and finding out to what extent the brain waves in the suboccipital area of the brain could be “entrained,” that is, forced to pickup the incoming frequency. Eager to have the LSD experience, I readily agreed to have my EEG taken and my brain waves “driven.” My brother, Paul, who was a medical student at that time and was deeply interested in psychiatry, agreed to supervise my session.

    I started feeling the effects of LSD about forty-five minutes after ingestion. At first, it was the feeling of slight malaise, lightheadedness, and nausea. Then these symptoms disappeared and were replaced by a fantastic display of incredibly colorful abstract and geometrical visions unfolding in rapid kaleidoscopic sequences. Some of them resembled exquisite stained glass windows in medieval Gothic cathedrals, others arabesques from Moslem mosques. To describe the exquisite nature of these visions, I made references to Sheherezade and A Thousand and One Nights and to the stunning beauty of Alhambra and Xanadu. At the time, these were the only associations I was able to make. Today, I believe that my psyche somehow managed to produce a wild array of fractal images, similar to graphic representations of nonlinear equations that can be produced by modern computers.

    As the session continued, my experience moved through and beyond this realm of exquisite aesthetic rapture and changed into an encounter and confrontation with my unconscious psyche. It is difficult to find words for the intoxicating fugue of emotions, visions, and illuminating insights into my life and existence in