The Greatest Fuel for Imagination
Our minds on music can generate some powerful hallucinations.
As a ten-year-old, I was addicted to a powerful drug. Sometimes I’d trip out on the living room floor for hours. The drug was a hallucinogen, unusual because it had no side effects other than a lingering wistfulness, a wish the real world could be so incredible.
My trips were beyond my imagination at the time. In a way, they were my imagination. Sometimes they were influenced by an image I’d seen. Other times they were just surreal landscapes as vivid to me as anything in the real world.
This drug filled me with the most incredible ecstasy. Exhilarating highs and heartbreaking lows. It made me feel invincible, and sometimes when I’d be out playing in the real world, I’d recall that feeling of invincibility just before, say, walking across a high and narrow log.
The drug varied in its effects. Sometimes they were so intense they left me reeling. Sometimes the effect was flatter, more of a curious intellectual exercise. But it never disappointed, and always left me craving more.
