Part One

1975 goes down in meteorological history as the first of two successive years with (by British standards) remarkably hot, dry, and sunny summers. Day after day I was out in shirtsleeves, delivering as much mail as I could before the hear became near unbearable.

The evening overtime had dried up. Now I went in for a stint of night-time shifts. I would begin work at midnight, and spend four hours sorting mail before going on to do my regular delivery, getting home for lunch around the middle of the day. 

Working nights was not a particularly pleasant experience. After a while, I began to tell which of the staff had been on nights for a long time. They were going against the grain of our natural rhythms, and it showed. They would possess a strange, almost surreal, sense of humour, which seemed a defence against their abnormal way of life. This was OK, except that it tended to get stuck, like a needle in a groove on a vinyl record, and became an ingrained habit in their personality.  

As if this wasn't enough, the midnight air of Oxford sorting office often wasn't too fresh. The smell of stale beer - some of these guys came in to a night of work straight from the pub - pervaded the place, mingling with the odour of sweaty male bodies. And on Friday nights especially, there would be the added ingredient of foul-smelling flatulence. It was always a relief and a pleasure to get out into the open air at half-past six in the morning and jump onto my delivery bike.

The long, crazy, idealism-driven weeks of work were taking their toll. There were evenings when, cycling through Oxford on my way to the midnight shift, I would pass crowds of people disgorging from the pubs. Laughing, talking noisily, and on their way home - to bed! Intense longing would overcome mem, as I struggled to find the energy to turn the pedals on my bike, en route to another twelve hours of work.

Part Two

It was during one of those long, hot summer weekends that I nearly died. I say 'nearly died': I don't really know. I am here to tell the tale, and nobody can really know. It remains, however, an unverifiable possibility that I almost died. 

Under the tutelage of shaman- sorcerer Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda learns about the existence of 'plant allies'. Three main plants are enlisted in order to help access 'separate realities' in the first two books. Of the three - the peyote cactus, the mushroom smoking mix, and the devil's weed, a species of datura - it is made clear that the darkest, least predictable, and most dangerous, is the last of the trio. "The weed is only used for power" asserts Don Juan in chapter three of the first volume. 

The datura species are closely related to those of the brugmansia family: henbane, mandrake, and deadly nightshade (the name gives the game away, it would seem). All contain atropine, hyoscamine, and scopolamine, hypno-psychedelic substances. Employed by medieval witches in Europe, and used to this day by shamans in south and central America and elsewhere, these plants have in truth been utilised since time immemorial, for flying, healing, and for changing the world. They come with an impressive pedigree.

To my infinite fascination, I discovered that jimson weed, datura stramonium, had another use in our modern day and age. It is employed for the relief of asthmatic and other breathing conditions. This being the case, I strolled into the local pharmacy and emerged a few moments later with a large tinful of jimson weed - enough to put half of north Oxford into a hypnotic trance. 

'These things need to be tested': I nodded my head as I shovelled the vile-tasting powder down my throat, trying not to gag. Two tablespoons should be plenty.

It was a hot Saturday afternoon, the end of another punishing week of work. Dave had cooked an early evening meal for the commune. Nothing much seemed to be happening, so I drifted upstairs to eat with the rest. It was when I started to chew the food presented before me that I first realised that something was amiss. The rice, normally richly moist, and the typically succulent vegetables, now turned into tasteless desiccated matter the moment they entered my mouth. All the moisture was being instantly sucked out as I went to chew; swallowing became impossible.

As I gazed at Dave, the plates, the walls, my commune colleagues, all were becoming seriously blurred. There was no sense of interconnectedness, no harmonious interweaving, and no accompanying bliss, such as was typical of psychedelics that I was familiar with. There was simply blurred vision, a viciously dry mouth, and an unspecified sense of unwellness. "Bloody hell" I muttered, "I'm off to bed." I could see no point in sticking around: this wasn't much fun, and I certainly wasn't going to be providing much entertainment for anyone else this Saturday evening.

As I began to make my unsteady way down the stairs the most bizarre experience overtook me. I would pick up a leg to move, and it seemed as if I was about to fly off into the air. Then, with equal rapidity, the leg took on an unbearable heaviness, and came crashing down to earth. Vague images of witches flying through the air assailed me, before I managed to crawl onto my mattress for an early Saturday night.     

What ensued over the following eighteen hours failed to make it into the annals of conscious history. It was as if a page from the book of time was simply torn out and thrown away, leaving nothing but a dark and empty blank. The closest similarity might be undergoing general anaesthetic in hospital, when the patient wakes up without realising he or she had gone to sleep, only to discover that funny things have been done to the physical body.

Mottie, Dave, and Liberty experienced it rather differently. Concerned about my condition, they made regular checks. It seemed as if pretty much everything had packed up, apart from the most basic of vital functions, such as breathing in and out. 

On one of their missions of mercy, my fellow communards found me standing on the landing outside the bedroom door. Motionless, transfixed, and staring into nowhere-in-particular, I was fully oblivious to their presence. On a further check thirty minutes later, they were surprised to find me in precisely the same position in precisely the same spot. Eventually, they managed to make me aware of having company. "I'm going to the toilet" I apparently uttered, before darting down to the loo.

On Monday Phil, a work colleague of Dave's, popped around for an afternoon cup of tea and a chat. Having fortuitously taken a week off work as holiday, I was alone at home. For the duration of Phil's visit, I could make him out only as a blur. My normally excellent eyesight had been shot to pieces, and I was beginning to reconcile myself to a lifetime of fuzzy, severely compromised vision. 

Part Three         

I recovered; even my eyes apparently returned to their former condition. But I emerged from the encounter with jimson weed as something of a different person. While the sublime acid experiences earlier in the year had sobered me up, jimson had knocked out a far deeper layer of cocksure recklessness. From then on I would approach substances of the mind with respect rather than careless abandon. The world is teeming with energies more powerful than your own; ignore this at your peril.

It was around this time that Castaneda's fourth book came out. Liberty and I were occupied with other things, and never got round to investigating it very closely. But in many ways it is the jewel in the crown of the Castaneda quartet. A real dramatic quality characterises some of the writing - by now Castaneda has honed his story-telling skills to near perfection - and various metaphysical realities are recounted to jaw-dropping effect. The chapters ' The Island of the Tonal'  and 'The Predilection of Two Warriors' in particular, number among the finest pieces of narrative writing I have encountered.

The title of this fourth book is 'Tales of Power' - which was strikingly appropriate for the matter at hand. We can talk of knowledge, wisdom; of energy and compassion: but there is also power. Sorcerers and shamans, witches, plant healers - the kind of people populating the pages of Castaneda's works - are specialists in negotiating the ways of power. Their aim is to learn how to access power, and then be able to utilise these powers, some for good, others for bad. Among their tools are various plants, such as the jimson weed. They open the gateways to magical power, and are not to be messed with.

'Respect' is arguably the biggest lesson that I learnt. I had already more-or-less given up on substance experimentation. Speed, codeine - morphine concoctions, and the rest, proved to be of dubious worth, and to the undoubted detriment of physical health. Following jimson weed, I became still more streamlined in my tastes. I might enjoy a social beer with friends, or the occasional smoke of grass, but generally speaking the appetite for substances had dissolved. Only one exception remained. It was what I considered my true ally in journeying through the highways and byways of life in search of Gnosis, of the Holy Grail. That was best-quality LSD....   

Images: Top: Is this Oxfordshire in 1975? No, it's Castaneda country - Sonora Desert

               Centre: Henbane

               Bottom: Jimsonweed