Do you believe "Doc" is real?

[Doc]

I knew it was a gamble. I knew it was a crapshoot. I knew the odds were not friendly.

I also knew how to hedge my bets a bit. Before doing the serious doses, I studied a great deal about meditation, biofeedback, and ultimate control of the body through will power. You know, things like lowering your heart rate and pulse. How to achieve altered states entirely on your own accord. Self hypnosis, and focused meditative states that allow you to say, completely ignore the fact that you are being sliced open, or hung from meat hooks in various acts like suspension. If you don't know what that is, I can't help you. Start the journey on your own.

In those meditative states I learned what doors are. Parts of the mind that you can visualize. Sections of your brain. Dormant places. Places closed and sealed off for whatever reason. I am not really sure how to describe it as words fail here. This goes beyond words and explaination, it is something one must experience. There are books, and some garbled accounts of others who have been there, like Dr Leary. Imagine going into a state of self induced hypnosis, and sleeping into a deep meditative trance. Now, imagine, while you are in that trance, visualising that your brain is like a house with many doors. You can walk into a room and examine it's contents. These rooms go on forever. It's like a whole universe in there. There are hundreds of doors. You can, with effort, much like lucid dreaming, make doors materialise. Like for example, the door to get "out." Some rooms are unpleasant... Bad thoughts. In a physical form. Made real by your perception. Now, some doors are locked. Try as you might... They just wont open. Even the most powerful lucid state of meditation will not make those doors open. LSD acts like... Hrm, it acts like a key or a battering ram, depending on the experience. Now, some of those doors are locked. And for damn good reason. What lies on the other side on some occasions... Will devour you. Eat you alive. There are aliens in that inner space, that collapsable universe inside your ears. I don't mean aliens like from another planet, but alien as it's something you have never met before. It's not from around here, and it's not happy to see you. Some doors you open, and what is inside is not created by your visualization. It's just there. Waiting for you. Who knows what's in these rooms for different people. In one of mine, the room stretched practically forever off into the horizon and it was filled with books. I damn near got lost in there because I honestly didn't want to come out. It was the most vile sort of bait. But I did hang out and look at some of those books. All of them were written in gibberish I could not understand, with pictures of things I had never seen. Strange machines. Impossible objects. Strange stuff. Like 4th dimensional objects immersed into a 2nd dimensional space. With each book I opened and thumbed through, my mind felt changed. I wanted to open more books. I wanted to open all books, and I had a hard time convincing my self that it was a bad idea. Certainly a few more wouldn't hurt, and a few more after that. And what would just one or two more be after that? I somehow had the pressence of mind to realise what was happening, and I had to stop and refocus and make my escape, which was very very difficult to do because by then, I was terribly submerged. I had to back track through a couple of rooms before I could start regaining my physical senses.

And I went back a few more times looking for the Great Library. Never found it. Found other places though.

Oh my... Did I just let you all in to my dementia?

There were books written about these doors. Infact, the band the Doors were named afted one of these books.

The sane going into these experiences must prepare themselves, and construct their own form of, well, I hate to say it, delusion or state of insanity. Those who suffer from schyzo-type disorders already exist in these states. Which is why LSD has such a profound effect on them.