Los Angeles Times writer Adam Tschorn wrote about his hour-long session at the Reality Center in Santa Monica. For $249, customers receive a multi-sensory experience that is supposed to be something like a shroom trip. With a couple of psilocybin experiences under his belt, Tschorn was able to compare his past trips with the Reality Center's drug-free session. The experience involves laying on a waterbed while colored lights shine on your closed eyes and trippy sounds play in your ears.
It sounds like Tschorn had a good trip:
Maybe halfway through, I became unmoored — detached as if I'd suddenly been cut free from a parasailing tether I didn't know I'd been connected to my whole life. I had the sensation of hurtling through space. When waves crashed in my ears in concert with the rumbling beneath me and the rippling patterns lit up my optic nerves, it seemed as if I was nothing but sand passing through a reality sieve, all my constituent molecules dissolving at the waterline of a vast ocean.
I was one with the swirling fractal rainbow aura at the center of the universe and, for a brief moment, it felt as if I was staring backward through time to observe my own swirling double-helix strands of DNA taking shape out of the cosmic soup of nothingness. I felt hot tears well into the corners of scrunched-shut eyes. They were tears of gratitude, tears of suddenly feeling at peace, as if just for a nanosecond I'd been lucky enough to get a glimpse behind the curtain, to peek at the run-of-show road map of the universe and see where my dust-speck self fit into it.
