The Electric Monk

theministryoftruth:

A simple explanation of LSD flashbacks, and of their changed character after 1967, is available. According to this theory, almost everybody suffers flashbacks with or without LSD. Any intense emotional experience—the death of a loved one, the moment of discovery that one is in love, the moment of an automobile smashup or of a narrow escape from a smashup—may subsequently and unexpectedly return vividly to consciousness weeks or months later. Since the LSD trip is often an intense emotional experience, it is hardly surprising that it may similarly “flash back. Even smoking marijuana can induce a flashback.

… Studies of flashbacks are hard to evaluate because the term has been used so loosely and variably. On the broadest definition, it means the transitory recurrence of emotions and perceptions originally experienced while under the influence of a psychedelic drug. It can last seconds or hours; it can mimic any of the myriad aspects of a trip; and it can be blissful, interesting, annoying, or frightening. Most flashbacks are episodes of visual distortion, time distortion, physical symptoms, loss of ego boundaries, or relived intense emotion lasting a few seconds to a few minutes. Ordinarily they are only slightly disturbing, especially since the drug user usually recognizes them for what they are; they may even be regarded lightheartedly as “free trips.” Occasionally they last longer, and in a small minority of cases they turn into repeated frightening images or thoughts. They usually decrease quickly in number and intensity with time, and rarely occur more than a few months after the original trip.

A typical minor and pleasant flashback is the following:

… Frequently afterward there is a momentary “opening” (“flash” would be too spastic a word) when for maybe a couple of seconds an area one is looking at casually, and indeed unthinkingly, suddenly takes on the intense vividness, composition, and significance of things seen while in the psychedelic condition. This “scene” is nearly always a small field of vision — sometimes a patch of grass, a spray of twigs, even a piece of newspaper in the street or the remains of a meal on a plate.

(Cohen 1970[1965], pp. 114-115)

Here is a more troublesome example:

For about a week I couldn’t walk through the lobby of A-entry at the dorm without getting really scared, because of the goblin I saw there when I was tripping.

(Pope 1971, p. 93)

Flashbacks are most likely to occur under emotional stress or at a time of altered ego functioning; they are often induced by conditions like fatigue, drunkenness, marihuana intoxication, and even meditative states. Falling asleep is one of those times of consciousness change and diminished ego control; an increase in the hypnagogic imagery common at the edge of sleep often follows psychedelic drug use and can be regarded as a kind of flashback. Dreams too may take on the vividness, intensity, and perceptual peculiarities of drug trips; this spontaneous recurrence of psychedelic experience in sleep (often very pleasant) has been called the high dream (Tart 1972). Marihuana smoking is probably the most common single source of flashbacks. Many people become more sensitive to the psychedelic qualities of marihuana after using more powerful drugs, and some have flashbacks only when smoking marihuana (Weil 1970). In one study frequency of marihuana use was found to be the only factor related to drugs that was correlated with number of psychedelic flashbacks (Stanton et al. 1976).

How common flashbacks are said to be depeds on how they are defined. By the broad definition we have been using, they occur very often; probably a quarter or more of all psychedelic drug users have experienced them. A questionanaire survey of 2,256 soldiers (Stanton and Bardoni 1972), leaving the definition to the respondents, revealed that 23 percent of the men who used LSD had flashbacks. In a 1972 survey of 235 LSD users, Murray P. Naditch and Sheridan Fenwick found that 28 percent had flashbacks. Eleven percent of this group (seven men in all) called them very frightening, 32 percent called them somewhat frightening, 36 percent called them pleasant, and 21 percent called them very pleasant. Sixty-four percent said that their flashbacks did not disrupt their lives in any way; 16 percent (4 percent of the whole LSD-using group) had sought psychiatric help for them (Naditch and Fenwick 1977). In a study of 247 subjects who had taken LSD in psychotherapy, William H. McGlothlin and David O. Arnold found 36 cases of flashbacks, only one of which was seriously disturbing (McGlothlin and Arnold 1971). McGlothlin, defining flashbacks narrowly for clinical purposes as “repeated intrusions of frightening images in spite of volitional efforts to avoid them” (McGlothlin 1974b, p. 291), estimates that 5 percent of habitual psychedelic users have experienced them.

There are few studies on the question of who is most susceptible. In 1974, R. E. Matefy and R. Krall compared psychedelic drug users who had flashbacks with those who did not, and found no significant differences in their biographies or on personality tests. The main causes of flashbacks were stress and anxiety. About 35 percent found them more or less pleasant, and the same proportion thought they could control them. Most accepted them as an inevitable part of their lives as members of the psychedelic fraternity and did not want help from psychiatry (Matefy and Krall 1974). Naditch and Fenwick found that the number of flashbacks, both pleasant and unpleasant, was highly correlated with the number and intensity of bad trips and the use of psychedelic drugs as self-prescribed psychotherapy. Those who enjoyed flashbacks and those who were frightened by them did not differ significantly on tests of ego functioning.

Several explanations for flashbacks have been proposed. One is that the drug has lowered the threshold for imagery and fantasy and made them less subject to voluntary control; in another version of this explanation, flashbacks are caused by a heightened attention to certain aspects of immediate sensory experience suggested by drug trips and reinforced by the community of drug users. Something more seems to be needed to account for repeated fearful relivings of sequences from past drug trips, and these have been explained as similar to traumatic neuroses precipitated by fright: disturbing unconscious material has risen to consciousness during the drug trip and can be neither accepted nor repressed. For example, D. F. Saidel and R. Babineau (1976) have reported a case of recurrent flashbacks — three years of blurring images and auditory distortions, with some anxiety and confusion — which they regard as a neurosis founded on the patient’s problems with his career and his relationship to his mother. (See also Horowitz 1969; Shick and Smith 1970; Heaton 1975.) Another explanation treats the flashback as an example of recall associated with a particular level of arousal. (Fischer 1971). In this conception the memory of an experience is best retrieved when the rate of mental data-processing is the same as it was during the original experience — in other words, when the state of consciousness in similar. Therefore, psychedelic experiences are likely to be recalled and relived when the ego’s sorting and control of sensory information is disturbed by drugs, stress, or the state of half-sleep.