“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

I believe there’s nothing in hallucinations that has anything to do with anything external to the internal psychological state of the person who’s got the hallucination. But there are nevertheless a lot of experiences by a lot of people who believe there’s reality in hallucinations. The same general idea may account for a certain amount of success that interpreters of dreams have. For example, some psychoanalysts interpret dreams by talking about the meanings of various symbols. And then, it’s not completely impossible that these symbols do appear in dreams that follow. So I think that, perhaps, the interpretation of hallucinations and dreams is a self-propagating process: you’ll have a general, more or less, success at it, especially if you discuss it carefully ahead of time.

Ordinarily it would take me about fifteen minutes to get a hallucination going, but on a few occasions, when I smoked some marijuana beforehand, it came very quickly. But fifteen minutes was fast enough for me.

One thing that often happened was that as the hallucination was coming on, what you might describe as “garbage” would come: there were simply chaotic images—complete, random junk. I tried to remember some of the items of the junk in order to be able to characterize it again, but it was particularly difficult to remember. I think I was getting close to the kind of thing that happens when you begin to fall asleep: There are apparent logical connections, but when you try to remember what made you think of what you’re thinking about, you can’t remember. As a matter of fact, you soon forget what it is that you’re trying to remember. I can only remember things like a white sign with a pimple on it, in Chicago, and then it disappears. That kind of stuff all the time.

Mr. Lilly had a number of different tanks, and we tried a number of different experiments. It didn’t seem to make much difference as far as hallucinations were concerned, and I became convinced that the tank was unnecessary. Now that I saw what to do, I realized that all you have to do is sit quietly—why was it necessary that you had to have everything absolutely super duper?

So when I’d come home I’d turn out the lights and sit in the living room in a comfortable chair, and try and try—it never worked. I’ve never been able to have a hallucination outside of the tanks. Of course I would like to have done it at home, and I don’t doubt that you could meditate and do it if you practice, but I didn’t practice.

Cargo Cult Science [ 4 ]

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas—which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked—or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how much there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn’t seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, “Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?”

I’m trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, “I’m, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?”

“Sure,” she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, “What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!” He starts to rub her big toe. “I think I feel it,” he says. “I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?”