LIGHT THROUGH DARKNESS

Translated from the French, Light Through Darkness is a kind of lavender dictionary of the hallucinations induced by hashish, ISD, lysergic acid and psilocybine. The author is not a scientist, and like any of the home experimenters from Huxley to most recently Jane Dunlap who took a flyer on ISD (Exploring Inner Space, Harcourt, Brace) subjected himself repeatedly to these drugs for five years and established himself as a ""dream- world"" painter and writer. The interest here is entirely clinical. The states one passes through under each drug are presented in elliptical prose-poetry with all the scientific detachment of Bela Lugosi. The merely curious reader will be put off by the slipperiness of the paragraphs which circle about like iridescent schools of words in a bathtub. As research, the book is only thorough in tracing sensations his own. For a more complete work, one might recommend this publisher's The Drug Experience (edited by David Ebin- page 961-1961) which offered more quality and variety.