Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin (born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was an American author born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She published journals, novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica.


 * "I was invited to do it as an experiment by Dr. Oscar Janiger who wanted to have a musician, a scientist and a writer. He thought the writer would be better able to tell what it was like. I was very curious to see wheter there was a world that only the LSD could give me that I had never penetrated. I'm always curious about an unkonwn world. The memory of the LSD is very clear and I wrote the whole thing out. A long-long-long-long memory and then I compared it to see if the images brought on by LSD were similar to images and sensations and impressions I had already described. And I found them in the work, particulary the first book I wrote which was House of Incest which was made up of dreams so the material was so like what was brought on by LSD that it proved my point that this is a world accessible to the poet, accessible to the artist and if we hadn't really belittle the poet so much and the artist so much we wouldn't have needed the alchemy or the drug to reach those visions. And one of the most marvelous things, which is almost undesribable and probably only happen to mystics was turning into gold. Suddenly I myself became gold and it was a sensation I've never yet been able to desribe. Except compared to making love."
 * -Anaïs Nin Observed (1974) http://youtube.com/r7g3DU-U3YI?t=6m35s


 * "I could find correlations (to the LSD imagery) all through my writing," Nin wrote, "find the sources of the images in past dreams, in reading, in memories of travel, in actual experience, such as the one I had once in Paris when I was so exalted by life that I felt I was not touching the ground, I felt I was sliding a few inches away from the sidewalk. Therefore, I felt, the chemical did not reveal an unknown world. What it did was to shut out the quotidian world as an interference and leave you alone with your dreams and fantasies and memories. In this way it made it easier to gain access to the subconscious life."


 * "Describing her experiment with Dr Janiger some 10 years later during a university lecture in Montreal, Ms Nin had said: "I was invited because I was a writer, and there was a scientist, there was a composer, and different kinds of people. But what I found after examination of this long dream, which I had and which lasted about eight hours, was that all the imagery that I had under LSD was in my work already. Which proves that if you are working from subconscious images, from dreams, from a complete freedom of access to the unconscious, then you don't need drugs. And of course I had an argument with (Aldous) Huxley because he said: 'You're lucky; you can just walk in and out of your unconscious, but some of us are not so lucky and we need LSD.' But you see, it's interesting as an experiment to find that all the richness of imagery was similar. I could track it down. So my conclusion was that we had closed the door on the artist, at least America certainly did. We had closed the door on a way of perception which the artist could have provided."
 * - The Diary Of Anais Nin, http://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.gossip.celebrities/i6stBY5esag