Table of Contents

TrippingNote to the Reader
Preface

Part I: Introduction
The Psychedelic (in) Society: A Brief Cultural History of Tripping

Basic Features of the Psychedelic Experience

Methodology and Perspectives Used in the Making of This Book

Part II: The Narratives
Aaron: Trawling the ghost stream

Alice Dee: Highway to the sky: The road seen only by the dreamer

Anne Waldman: Point and Click: Icons in the window to the ancestral manse

Brendan: Pealing Faces

Bruce Eisner: Dazed in the desert at the end of time

Carl: The wat of the world

Charles Hayes: Eat the moment (and other stories)

Charlie: That's when I realized I was out of my senses

Clark Heinrich: Heaven (and another story)

Daniel: I realized I was dead

Dennis: They don't show you all this on the top of the mountain just to destroy you on your way down

Fiona: Unbridled

George: Saved by the belle (and other stories)

Gregory: Sinister toys and the Internet of souls

Henry Bass: Hallucinating the horror of sobriety

Herbie Greene: Ride the snake and break on through (or) Crashing the snake dance

Jack: The pinball machine I could play without feeding it coins

James: Hell's den and Pan's glen (and another story)

Jarl: An early absolution

Jason: The orgasm death dance (and other stories)

Jeremy: The schlomus: The price of a moment's doubt

John Perry Barlow: My first trip

Julian: An awakening from within

Kate Coleman: Then the emotions started happening

Keely Stahl: The menacing orgasm that almost melted me away

Keith: First communion with life

Kenny: How can I die if I'm not here? (and other stories)

Kevin: To either die or come

Lena: I've definitely been psychotic

Leonard Gibson: Portals of flame, petals of the lotus blossum

Leonard Mercado: Psychedelic terra firma

Malcolm: The Psychedelic is the Center

Marcel: Is this a trap or a welcome?

Mark: Sounding the black box of the subconscious

Mark Fischer: Over the spillway

Matthew S. Kent: Maha maya: The V in my path

Megan: A blink of rabbit fur

Paul Devereaux: Do I want to be seeing this?

Peter: Everything else was normal (and other stories)

Philip Cooper: The Cathedral of San Pedro the Divine

Reverend Marianne: The vision made it real (and other stories)

Robert Bell: I had a theory who I was (and another story)

Robert Charles Wilson: The Immigrant's landing

Ruth: The apostate's homecoming

Sarah: Our Lady of the Eastern Star

Stephen Kessler: The initiate

Steve Silberman: the organismic display monitor

Steven Martin Cohen: A thousand cruise missles pointed straight at my brain stem

Terry: Loosing the hounds of war

Tim Page: Memoirs of an acid-salved war photographer

Part III: A Conversion with Terance McKenna
Appendix: A Concise Index of Psychedelic Substances

Notes
Bibliography and Resources
Acknowledgments
Index

About the Author

Charles Hayes, a substance use disorder counselor in New York City, has been a writer/editor for a variety of businesses and organizations, a communications manager for a marketing firm, and a journalist whose work has appeared in Reason, The Oxford American, Tikkun, High Times, and E magazine. Charles can be contacted by email at trippingtales@aol.com and at his website, www.psychedelicadventures.com.

Reviews

“Offers a multitude of perspectives from all walks of life about the psychedelic experience . . . In this new age of microdosing and psychedelic research and experimentation, Tripping is a must-read for anyone who's interested in consciousness expansion.” – Boing Boing

“A magnificent collection." – Alexander Shulgin, godfather of MDMA
 
"Hayes is such a bristling and intelligent writer that one almost wishes that he had written the whole book himself. The free flow of ideas about these verboten substances and their anthropological/psychological possibilities is exhilarating." – The Oxford American
 
"A sensitive and responsible approach to documenting profound experiences with 'drugs.' The results of this informal research are both informative and highly moving." – The Lancet
 
“Intriguing. The narratives are informative, cautionary, hilarious and spooky. The uninitiated may recoil from stories of visions of goat-devils, the moon as an alien flashlight, and nude escapades at Burning Man, but those in on the book's implicit wink will find like-minded stories of drug-induced bliss and abject terror." – San Francisco Chronicle
 
"Readers will find a sequence of first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales) that presents, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last thirty years as refracted through the prism of a drug experience." – The Chronicle of Higher Education
 
“We can theorize about psychedelics till the cow patties come home, but there's nothing as poignant, perplexing, and funny as a well-told trip report. Charles Hayes has gathered together some great ones. Tripping is instructive, hilarious and -- let's face it -- enticing. I loved it.” – R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000
 
"A classic in the growing body of contemporary psychedelic literature. For the experienced, Tripping is a harvest of inspiring moments and a reminiscence of one's own deeply shape-shifting journeys. For the uninitiated, it is a profound glimpse into the hidden world of the subconscious and a provocation for wider acceptance of the usefulness of psychedelic states." – Allan Badiner, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics