Don’t knock paranoia. It may be terrifying — but it could save your life

This did not come entirely as a surprise. As a graduate student at Yale I experimented with LSD. Why anyone ever thought this drug would sweep the world and reduce the youth of the West to a state of gibbering addiction I cannot imagine because it was no fun at all, just weird. Among a number of temporary alterations to my perception there were two of a paranoid nature: walking the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, I kept hearing, in the indistinct conversations of strangers, my own name. Realising this was probably the result of eating two little pieces of blotting paper, I kept my nerve, told myself the perception was unreal, and waited for it to fade.

The second mind alteration, though, never entirely did fade. On closing my eyes, the shapes and patches that often swim across our darkened vision seemed to resolve themselves (as clouds can) into faces and figures — grotesque, frightening images. I can still do this by concentrating hard; and a bad experience some years ago with the anti-malarial drug Lariam sharpened and magnified the effect. One of my brothers, who has never taken mind-altering drugs, says this happens to him anyway, and perhaps it is no more than the gestalt process by which the human mind, confronted by apparently random and meaningless visual data, may impose or ‘find’ meaningful shapes and patterns. The meaning is not inconsistent with the data but nor is it necessarily implied by it. The point in my brother’s and my case is that the meaning we found was threatening. Joan of Arc would probably have seen angels.

I think all paranoia may be a form of gestalt. Take the free-fall parachute experience. I had not expected to be scared but, alone (apart from the pilot) with the instructor to whom I was to be strapped, and as our little plane spiralled up slowly to 10,000 feet, it seemed to dawn on me that this was a conspiracy to kill me.