Urging Edward to fight the change, Emily grabs his hand, immediately being enveloped by the primordial energy emanating from Edward. Watched over by Emily, Edward begins to uncontrollably regress again, the transformations no longer requiring the intake of "first flower" or sensory deprivation. His friends bring Edward home, hoping that the transformations will end. She searches into the vortex for Edward, finding him as he is on the brink of becoming a non-physical form of proto-consciousness and possibly disappearing from our version of reality altogether. Emily arrives to find a swirling maelstrom where the tank had been. An energy wave released from the experiment stuns Edward's colleagues and destroys his tank. In the final experiment, Edward experiences a more profound regression, transforming into an amorphous mass of conscious, primordial matter. Despite his colleagues' concern, Edward stubbornly continues. At one stage he emerges from the isolation tank as a feral and curiously small-statured, light-skinned caveman, going on a rampage through some streets in town and breaking in a zoo before returning to his natural form. In later experiments, Edward experiences actual, physical biological devolution. Emerging from the tank, his mouth bloody, frantically writing notes because he is unable to speak, Edward insists on being X-rayed before he "reconstitutes." A radiologist inspecting the X-rays says they belong to a gorilla. Monitored by his colleagues, Edward insists that his visions have "externalized". Repairing a disused tank in a medical school, Edward uses it to experience a series of increasingly drastic visions, including one of early Hominidae. When toxic concentrations of the substance make increased dosage dangerous, Edward returns to sensory deprivation, believing it will enhance the effects of the substance at his current dose. with a sample of the Hinchi potion for analysis by his colleagues and further self-experimentation, and continues taking it in order to take his exploration of altered states of consciousness to a new and higher level. The following morning, Edward leaves the Hinchi plateau under a cloud, having killed, while in his intoxicated state, a large specimen of the Hinchi's sacred monitor lizard (which a petroglyph shown in the dream sequence shows that they believe to have given them the sacred mushroom in the mythic past). Immediately after consuming the mixture, Edward experiences bizarre, intense hallucinations, including one of the petrifaction and subsequent erosion by blown sand of Emily and himself. An indigenous elder ("the brujo") is seen with a root (presumably intended to be a Heimia root) in his hand, which he asks Edward to hold, before cutting it in order to add some drops of blood to the mixture he is preparing. The tribe calls Heimia salicifolia by a Hinchi name meaning "first/primordial flower" in recognition of the deep memory states which it can evoke. During the climb up into the Hinchi hill country (a plateau covered in spectacular mushroom-shaped ventifacts) Edward is told by his guide, Eduardo Echeverria, that the Hinchi use in their ceremonies a potion containing the sacred mushroom Amanita muscaria and the shrub Sinicuiche ( Heimia salicifolia), which they are collecting for next year's ceremonies. When Edward hears of the Hinchi tribe whose members experience shared hallucinatory states, he travels to Mexico to participate in their ceremony. Seven years later, Edward and Emily have two daughters, are on the brink of divorce, and reunite with the couple who first introduced them. At a faculty party, he meets fellow "whiz kid," and his future wife, Emily. 4 Conflict between Russell and ChayefskyĮdward Jessup, a Columbia University psychopathologist, is studying schizophrenia, and begins to think that "our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states." He begins experimenting with sensory deprivation using a flotation tank, aided by two like-minded researchers, Arthur Rosenberg and Mason Parrish.
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