Samuel Taylor Coleridge had an opium-induced dream in which he composed “Kubla Khan”, and upon waking, he wrote what he could remember. It begins:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
This creation story might not be true, but I believe Coleridge and Carrie Fisher were interested in mind expansion. (Post Five – FROM CARRIE FISHER).
Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, says in Brave New World Revisited in 1958:
Opium, or rather soma, was the people’s religion. Like religion, the drug had power to console and compensate, it called up visions of another , better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity.” (Huxley. Brave New World Revisited, 69).
He is discussing his better-known novel Brave New World.
In 1931, Huxley published Brave New World, a dystopian novel about a future world of eugenics, feelies, pneumatic women, helicopters, rockets, and soma, a drug that delivers pleasurable effects and no side-effects:
Now– such is progress– the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think– or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning when they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to . . .” (Huxley. Brave New World, 37).
Soma is the “perfect drug”. (Huxley. Brave New World, 36). It is “[e]uphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.” (Huxley. Brave New World, 36). It has “[a]ll the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” (Huxley. Brave New World, 36).
Huxley thought: “[w]hat the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.” He would have also thought that Coleridge, an artist, was able to see things that were inaccessible to most people without the influence of chemicals. (Huxley. Doors, 33).
Soma is fiction, but Huxley was interested in mind expansion, and he experimented with mescalin. He describes his experience in The Doors of Perception in 1954 where he explains his understanding of how the human mind works: “the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive.” (Huxley. Doors, 23). Each of us is:
. . . capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. (Huxley. Doors, 22).
Huxley calls this omniscient mind the “Mind at Large”. (Huxley. Doors, 23), and the “Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.” (Huxley. Doors, 23). The purpose of this reducing valve is to eliminate everything that is not “biologically or socially useful.” (Huxley. Doors, 33). Unfortunately, “Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve . . .” (Huxley. Doors, 24).
Huxley says something similar in his essay “Heaven and Hell” in 1956. He describes “the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.” (Huxley. “Heaven and Hell”, 85).
“Some people never consciously discover their antipodes. Others make an occasional landing. Yet others (but they are few) find it easy to go and come as the please.” (Huxley. “Heaven and Hell”, 85).
For those other than the last group, two methods of discovering one’s antipodes exist: (1) chemicals such as mescalin or lysergic acid, and (2) hypnosis. (Huxley. “Heaven and Hell”, 86). Both methods “carry the consciousness to the same region; but the drug has the longer range and takes its passengers further.” (Huxley. “Heaven and Hell”, 86).
For Huxley, the chemical was mescalin because “it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist’s repertory.” (Huxley. Doors, p. 9). He says about being under its influence: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation– the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” (Huxley. Doors, 17).
“That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely.” (Huxley. Doors, p. 62).
I. Librarian
Works Cited:
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan. Accessed 18 May 2026.
Fisher, Carrie. Postcards from the Edge. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Perennial Library, 1969.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. Perennial Library, 1965.
Huxley, Aldous. “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds.” The Saturday Evening Post, 18 Oct. 1958.
Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004.
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Post Five – FROM CARRIE FISHER
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