The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 75 of 125
Provocative and integrative halves of a trip
During that summer in the glade I read Christopher Bache’s Dark Night, Early Dawn, which had just come out and remains the outstanding attempt to get LSD studies on the road again. For a large part of his self-experimentation Bache had a series of horrendous trips. At the most agonizing point of each one, however, when he felt he could truly bear no more, the trip went through a 180-degree turn, and he found himself swept up by new insight and joy. From this experience he suggests that the dynamics of a fully resolved trip fall into two opposed halves, which are related dialectically. In the first, which he calls the provocative, the subject is flooded, and not infrequently submerged, by unconscious material. In the second, which he calls the integrative, the new material is digested in a more balanced, more highly evolved whole. While the provocative stage can indeed be dire, the integrative almost always tends to be joyous. In this sense the only truly “bad” trip is the one in which the process isn’t fully completed, and material that has not been integrated can linger and cause distress for days or weeks to come. Which perhaps could be seen as corroborating the old hippie street wisdom that a high dose of psychedelics is in fact much “safer” than a low one.