does, and through this kind of play, children
develop their knowledge about reality by
stepping back from or going beyond it.
This capacity for creating other characters
and other worlds continues into adulthood in
daydream fantasies and in the enjoyment of
fiction- and poetry-reading, film-viewing and
theatre-going, electronic gaming, creative writ-
ing, painting, and other arts, which have been
described as ‘qualia machines’ offering up new
varieties of consciousness (Reinerth and Thon,
2016). When we feel ‘immersed’ or ‘absorbed’ in,
or ‘transported’ to, a world created by a written
text or a set of moving images, we may retain
more or less awareness of the environment in
which we are reading or watching. This might
depend on many other factors, including our
evaluations of or empathy with the protago-
nists, the richness of our mental imagery, our
familiarity with the story’s genre, and maybe
even basic demographic factors like gender
(van Laer et al., 2014).
People also vary widely in their capacity for
‘psychological absorption’, a variable closely
related to hypnotisability. Absorption is usu-
ally measured with the Tellegen Absorption
scale (Tellegen and Atkinson, 1974; Jamie-
son, 2005) and those who score highly are
more likely to report a variety of unusual
experiences and respond more strongly to
drugs like psilocybin (Blackmore, 2017).
Virtual reality technologies can now create
elaborate multisensory simulations which
are heightened by users’ ability to interact
physically with them. VR worlds can induce
motion sickness, or ‘simulation sickness’,
thanks to how they manipulate sensory per-
ception and feedback, and responses to VR
on dimensions like social paranoia or degree
of presence in the virtual world can be used to
predict future occurrence of PTSD symptoms
(Freeman et al., 2014). And so, the boundaries
between ‘consensus reality’ and other kinds
of reality continue to shift and blur.
In contemporary Western culture, other
worlds are usually confined to shared forms
of fiction, or to private fantasy, but in many
other cultures they are deliberately cultivated
‘the conceptually infused
alternatives to reality
that children conjure
up feed back on their
assessments of reality’(Harris, 2000, p. 7)
‘science fiction [is] the only
genuine consciousness-
expanding drug’(Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Of sand and
stars’, 1983)and shared as closer equivalents to the everyday
world. In many cultures, certain people train as ‘sha-
mans’. This word came originally from the Siberian
Chuckchee tribe but is now widely used to describe
men and women who can enter spirit worlds, cure
sickness through magic, or contact spirits and other
invisible beings. Usually shamans follow elaborate
rituals, often but not always involving hallucinogenic
drugs, to reach these other worlds (Krippner, 2000).One such culture is that of the Yąnomamö, a group of
indigenous people living deep in the forest between
Venezuela and Brazil (Chagnon, 1992). Their world
of myths and invisible entities consists of four par-
allel layers, one above the other, including the third
layer of forests, rivers, and gardens in which they live.
Accomplished shamans can call the beautiful hekura
spirits from the sky, hills, trees, or even from the edge
of the universe to enter their bodies through the chest and there to find another
world of forests and rivers within.
To call hekura, the shamans (who in this culture are only ever men) prepare a
complex hallucinogenic green powder called ebene, paint themselves elaborately
with red pigment, put on their feathers, and blow the powder into each other’s
nostrils through a long hollow tube. Coughing, gasping, groaning, and dribbling
green mucous from the nose, they then call the hekura, who soon come glowing
out of the sky along their special trails into the shaman’s chest, from where they
can be sent to devour the souls of enemies, or to cure sickness in the village.
Sometimes researchers have been invited to join such ceremonies and take the
drugs themselves. Siegel describes a long night spent with a Huichol Indian
shaman in Mexico, matching him gulp for gulp in drinking a potent alcoholic
liquor made from the agave plant and a gruel made from the peyote cactus,
which contains the hallucinogen mescaline (Chapter 13). When the first waves
of nausea had passed, Siegel opened his eyes and ‘the stars came down’, dart-
ing about and leaving tracer patterns in the air. When he tried to grab one, a
rainbow of afterimages followed his moving hand. Then there were patterns, all
the familiar form constants, and much more. A lizard crawled out of his vomit,
followed by thousands of army ants in party hats. ‘Stop it! I want answers, not car-
toons!’ he pleaded, and he asked the shaman about hallucinations. The answer
came clear: ‘There are no hallucinations with peyote. There are only truths’ (Sie-
gel, 1992, pp. 28–29).
Back home in his California laboratory, Siegel knew that what he had seen was all
in his own mind.
How do you tell this holy man who believes he has the power to see
the gods that there are no more gods or Demons than there are images
of those things in the brain? How do you tell a poor naked farmer who
has only his peyote dreams that the world of our dreams is all inside our
minds?
(Siegel, 1992, p. 31)‘There are no
hallucinations with
peyote. There are only
truths’(Huichol shaman, in Siegel,
1992, pp. 28–29)‘How do you tell a poor
naked farmer who has
only his peyote dreams
that the world of our
dreams is all inside our
minds?’(Siegel, 1992, p. 31)and failures to follow the protocol. she concluded that
sargent’s results, and therefore the meta-analyses that
relied so heavily on them, provided no reliable evidence
for psi (Blackmore, 1987; sargent, 1987), a conclusion
that spurred her transformation from belief in esP to scep-
ticism (Blackmore, 1996a).
Following the apparent success of the autoganzfeld, more
replications followed, but few were successful. then another
meta-analysis of thirty new studies found no evidence for
esP (milton and Wiseman, 1999), while others, including
further new studies, did (Bem, Palmer, and Broughton,
2001; Williams, 2011). the arguments have continued
without resolution (milton, 1999; Palmer, 2003).