Dream Stuff

"I took my pill at eleven," reported Novelist Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. "I [was] in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light . . . The legs, for example, of that chair--how miraculous their tubularity ... I spent several minutes--or was it several centuries?--not merely gazing at those bamboo legs but actually being them . . ." Amateur Mystic Huxley was experimenting with mescaline, a drug which some have thought might become a psychiatrist's tool, like pentothal and Amytal. The purpose of these drugs is to banish a patient's inhibitions and "bring him out of himself." One of the most effective of these drugs--and most bizarre in its brain-stabbing effects--is lysergic acid diethylamide, better known to the trade as LSD 25.

First developed in Switzerland in 1938, LSD 25 has been much neglected until recently. Unlike mescaline, which induces a series of euphoric dreams and images, or pentothal, which merely leads the patient through mental and emotional playbacks of childhood scenes as he becomes semicomatose, LSD 25 enables the patient to re-experience his past without loss of consciousness, and calmly watch himself in the process. This is, roughly, like the ordinary dreamer who knows he is dreaming while he is dreaming. The patient injected with LSD 25 can later recall everything that took place in minute detail.

In the current London Journal of Mental Science, three British psychiatrists, R. A. Sandison, A. M. Spencer and J.D.A.

Whitelaw, discuss the results of treatment with LSD 25 on 36 psychiatric cases. Their conclusion: as an aid to psychotherapy, LSD 25 is the best of all such drugs so far tested.

Given a standard (25 micrograms) dose of LSD 25, the patient first shows the symptoms of an addict of hashi He starts giggling or crying, soon switches to silence punctuated by an occasional scream. He trembles, sweats, and shows every symptom of terrible anxiety. Then he goes into one of several "experiences": P: Patients can often recall and re-experience their childhood in clear detail. Wrote one woman: "I realized that I was reliving an incident that occurred when I was quite small, on holiday ... I was not in the least surprised to see my hand and arm [become] quite little, about the size of a child of seven or eight . . ." P:Others find themselves way back in time: "Part of me was detached . . .

When I looked at the doctor's hand, the detached part of me saw it as it was, the other part expressed a feeling of horror . . . the hand was so old as to be ageless . . . There were sand and bright colors . . . Egyptian ornamentation and a sphinx . . . P:Still others experience identification with friends or relatives. Several patients thought themselves to be their own mothers, and two went through the experiences of their own birth.

No psychiatrist will go as far as Author Huxley (who prescribed mescaline for all mankind as a specific against unhappiness). But LSD 25, while it has no direct curative powers, can be of great benefit to mental patients. It encourages them to interpret their own soul-searing fantasies, and the newly revealed memories help the psychiatrist plan further treatment. Of the 23 cases that had completed treatment, LSD 25 coupled with psychotherapy resulted in 14 cases recovered, while one showed great improvement.

Somewhat closer to Huxley's goal is a new drug called Meratran, hailed by its makers as a "pink pill to cure the blues.'' Developed by the William S. Merrell Co.

of Cincinnati, the pink pill--chemical name: alpha (2-piperidyl) benzhydrol hydrochloride--was tested for 18 months by two local doctors under the supervision of Psychiatrist Howard Fabing. Human guinea pigs: 320 patients who were unhappy in love, discouraged with their jobs, generally worried. Nontoxic, non-habit-forming, Meratran provided a quick pickup and morale boost without the jangling, jittery aftereffects of Benzedrine (TIME, June 14), and without inducing hallucinations or nightmares. Though wary of all such "anti-blues" drugs, independent physicians here tentatively described Meratran as "interesting" and "promising."

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