Peyote Dreams: Journeys in the Land of Illumination

A philosophical and visionary account of consciousness expansion, written by a French surrealist who took peyote more than two hundred times in pursuit of a question Western philosophy could not answer for him.

Duits, in a dead-end existential crisis, was urged by an old friend to take peyote — and did so, in his words, "like a man committing suicide." What followed became the substance of this book: a precise, poetically written account of his experiences with the Mexican cactus and the philosophical reckonings he had under and around it. Across eleven chapters he examines how Western thought's commitment to reason and materialism cuts the modern mind off from inner knowledge, how sacramental plants do not distort reality but unveil it, and what it means to remain "the master of one's mind" while consciousness opens. First published in French in 1969 and translated into English in 2013, the book sits in the lineage of Huxley's mescaline writings and the broader twentieth-century literature of visionary plants.

Details

• Author: Charles Duits
• Publisher: Park Street Press / Inner Traditions
• Originally published: 1969 (English translation 2013)
• Pages: 224

About the Author

Charles Duits

French writer, poet, and surrealist (1925–1991). Duits began his philosophical and literary work at age seventeen, after sending his poems to André Breton, who invited him to join the Paris surrealist group. He met regularly with Anaïs Nin, who wrote of him in her Journals, and was a longtime student of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way and Zen Buddhism. He authored eleven books and novels in French, including the heroic fantasy saga Ptah Hotep and Nefer.