The following is an excerpt from _Conversations with the Dead_ by David Gans, published September '91 by Citadel Press. Available from Grateful Dead Mercantile, 1-800-CAL-DEAD.

BEAR (Owsley Stanley) - Oakland, California, January 13, 1991

Bear: Kesey was the kind of guy that reached out, took your knobs, and tweaked them all the way to 10. All of them. And the whole scene was running at 10 all the time. It was almost as sudden, and as different, as discovering psychedelics themselves for the first time, at another level.

Q: I would venture to say, then, that the social aspect of it - the collective acid experience - probably was part of the eye-opener there, right? I mean, everybody was tripping together, and in on the joke together, or in on the multiple jokes?

Bear: I think it was more than that. They did specific things. They made specific sounds. They did specific stuff. They'd loop tape machines together and do delays and get reverberation, the sound reinforcing itself. There's a certain persistence - like when you're really high and move your hand, you get a smear. Well, there's also other kinds of persistence, and they reinforced all these things.

It seemed as though they had rediscovered something from ancient ways and ancient times. A lot of the music that's used in shamanic rituals does the same thing, which we discovered later ...