In Dreams You Will Lose Part 2: ALTERED STATES

At the height of the love-in era, recreational chemicals were allegedly taken not to "tune in, turn on and drop out," as Dr. Timothy Leary recommended and most people really had in mind. Rather, as in the Native American Church rites and the rituals described in Carlos Casteñeda's various adventures with the shaman Don Juan, the various hallucinogenics were taken to free the limited human mind and allow it to reach more ethereal spheres.

In Altered States, a film adapted by Paddy Chayevsky from his book of the same name, Dr. Edward Jessup (William Hurt) is convinced he can escape the confines of his physical body. Initially, he claims to be exploring the concept of God while immersed in a sensory deprivation chamber. The basis for his experiments is schizophrenia. Is it really a disease, a biochemical disorder, he asks, or simply an uncontrolled connection to another state of consciousness? And if it's the latter, what might one not find if he has the courage to explore that world?

Unable to achieve his goal with sensory deprivation alone, Jessup travels to a remote area of Latin America and participates in a shamanic ceremony. Despite the warnings of the chief shaman, he takes the natives' vision-inducing potion back home and combines it with a new series of sensory deprivation experiments despite the warnings of friends and family. His obsessive search results in unexpected and potentially deadly results, unleashing a power he is helpless to control.

This 1980 trip into the world of psychedelia--a kind of swan song of the flower-child period--is visually stunning and intellectually provocative. With his customary intensity, Hurt makes Jessup a man we want to like and yet find ourselves rejecting because of his stubborn refusal to accept the dangers inherent in what he's doing. Like an adolescent experimenting with death, he rebels against not just the advice of his friends but common sense, refusing to pause even long enough to consider the ramifications of what is happening to him or how it might affect others. He is a consummate narcissist until the monster he creates forces him to acknowledge that sometimes we do need the help of those who care about us to survive. He is an icon of psychobabble, a chronic intellectual seeking to rationalize the irrational.

Blair Brown is his wife, Emily, a woman who is at first drawn to his bizarre and occasionally outrageous behavior only to outgrow him as she matures and he remains stagnant. His friends Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and Mason Parrish (Charles Haid) put up with Jessup's madness longer than most of us would. The three characters are excellent foils--the altruists who in the end save the narcissist from self-destruction.

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