Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures - Softcover

Charles Hayes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140195742 ISBN 13: 9780140195743

Publisher: Penguin Compass, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of transformational, awe-provoking psychedelic experiences. 

In Tripping, Charles Hayes has gathered fifty narratives about unforgettable psychedelic experiences from an international array of subjects representing all walks of life--respectable Baby Boomers, aging hippies, young ravers, and accomplished writers such as John Perry Barlow, Anne Waldman, Robert Charles Wilson, Paul Devereux, and Tim Page. Taking a balanced, objective approach, the book depicts a broad spectrum of altered states, from the sublime to the terrifying. Hayes's supplemental essays provide a synopsis of the history and culture of psychedelics and a discussion of the kinetics of tripping. Specially featured is an interview with the late Terence McKenna, who was perhaps the preeminent psychedelic spokesperson of our time. A storehouse of astonishing, often otherworldly tales, Tripping is a compendium of forbidden memories that enables readers to trip vicariously or compare notes on their own experiences.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Hayes, a substance use disorder counselor in New York City, has been a writer/editor for a variety of businesses and organizations, a communications manager for a marketing firm, and a journalist whose work has appeared in Reason, The Oxford American, Tikkun, High Times, and E magazine. Charles can be contacted by email at trippingtales@aol.com and at his website, www.psychedelicadventures.com.

Review

“A magnificent collection." – Alexander Shulgin, godfather of MDMA
 
"Hayes is such a bristling and intelligent writer that one almost wishes that he had written the whole book himself. The free flow of ideas about these verboten substances and their anthropological/psychological possibilities is exhilarating." – The Oxford American
 
"A sensitive and responsible approach to documenting profound experiences with 'drugs.' The results of this informal research are both informative and highly moving." – The Lancet
 
“Intriguing. The narratives are informative, cautionary, hilarious and spooky. The uninitiated may recoil from stories of visions of goat-devils, the moon as an alien flashlight, and nude escapades at Burning Man, but those in on the book's implicit wink will find like-minded stories of drug-induced bliss and abject terror." – San Francisco Chronicle
 
"Readers will find a sequence of first-person narratives (a form at least as old as The Canterbury Tales) that presents, in kaleidoscopic fashion, the last thirty years as refracted through the prism of a drug experience." – The Chronicle of Higher Education
 
“We can theorize about psychedelics till the cow patties come home, but there's nothing as poignant, perplexing, and funny as a well-told trip report. Charles Hayes has gathered together some great ones. Tripping is instructive, hilarious and -- let's face it -- enticing. I loved it.” – R.U. Sirius, Mondo 2000
 
"A classic in the growing body of contemporary psychedelic literature. For the experienced, Tripping is a harvest of inspiring moments and a reminiscence of one's own deeply shape-shifting journeys. For the uninitiated, it is a profound glimpse into the hidden world of the subconscious and a provocation for wider acceptance of the usefulness of psychedelic states." – Allan Badiner, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Compass
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140195742
• ISBN 13: 9780140195743
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: Charles Hayes