Mike Oldfield's "Changeling" - The last LSD trip

"One evening, I was to have the last LSD trip in my life. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I do remember walking down Vauxhall Bridge Road, where we were tripping. All of a sudden, something simply switched in my body, almost like switching on a huge electric current. It felt like I was being electrocuted.

The effect on me was immediate. I felt a veil was lifted off, from where I was and what I was, and from what everybody was. The people around me, they weren't people I knew any more, everybody was stripped of anything I had ever learned about them. They looked to me to be just like biological machines, almost like robots, but made of flesh and blood. I saw into their bloodstreams and down to the molecular level; I could see that all their movements were dictated by electrical impulses and chemical reactions. They were in­haling this gas which we call air into their lungs, they were somehow processing it into energy so they could move around. Even their mouths, the way they spoke - they were making these weird, strange sounds we call language. It wasn't that I had a hallucination, that I imagined that humans were machines, but I knew, I saw it, and indeed I can still see it. We are machines. If you see that in its harsh reality, it's horrifying.

Then my consciousness expanded even further. It became a hopelessly lost, weird thing, floating in the middle of an eternal void. It was like, quite suddenly, somebody had told me the secret they had been trying to cover up for my whole childhood. I faced the harsh reality of looking at our existence in its purest, most physical level, without the foggiest idea how we got there, or how we came to be conscious, or why, for what purpose. I felt I had unlocked some terrible Pandora's box, that somebody had told me life was not really how I imagined it, that I was lost in a completely bio- electromechanical world without a clue as to how I had got there or why I was there; what was more, I was going to disappear from it by dying, without finding a single explana­tion for anything. At the time it just seemed such a terrible truth. I felt I was the only person who knew it. I wanted to go up to everybody and say, 'Don't you know, don't you know, this is real, this is how it really is!'

I'd always been sensitive to the world around me, with my emotional 'antennae' that could tune into the atmospheres of places. I'd sometimes wondered how I could get closer to what it was all about, if I could only find the doorway to the wider understanding I knew was out there. Suddenly it was smashed wide open, like the huge doors of a cathedral being ripped off and hurled away, and I was thrust outside. I could see physical objects down to the atomic level, and I could see our whole planet as a great, big sphere hurtling through space, all at once. I felt overwhelmed with dizziness, just being on our planet. I was conscious of the massive size of it, of the fact it was going round and round, that the entire thing was hurtling through infinite space at an enormous speed, pushed and pulled by incredible forces. I felt I was going to fall off at any second; I was seasick just from standing still.

It completely terrified me. We grow up, we are indoctrin­ated, we live our lives, we die and that's that; but with this thing it was like a rocket going up, 'ssshheeoooee!' It felt like I didn't belong here, I felt I was a fish completely taken out of water and I was lying on the shore, gasping for oxygen. I'd always felt like I didn't belong, that I was a person apart: well, it was like that feeling, magnified a million times.

That was the beginning of it. It was like seeing the other side of the coin. One side was, 'My name's Michael Oldfield, musician, I'm living in Pimlico, I went to St Edward's School in Reading,' and the other side was, 'I'm a nameless organic machine, lost and existing in an incomprehensible world, an incomprehensible universe.' I tried to deal with it, but the panic I felt was indescribable. It was a real sledgehammer blow. I'd experienced normal panic attacks before, but this was totally different, like letting off the Hiroshima bomb compared to a little firework. It's all very well panicking when you're about to take off in a plane, but when you have that same experience on the ground, in a garden with butterflies flying around and birds singing, there's something seriously wrong. I couldn't communicate what I was feeling to any­body; I tried, but nobody could understand me, which panicked me even more. Indeed, people still don't understand me when I try to explain it all.

Of course, I now know I'd got what they call the horrors. There must be something about LSD that fundamentally changes and expands how your brain works and perceives things. I have never touched another LSD pill in my life and I've only ever had the occasional puff of a joint. I am still terrified when someone is rolling a joint and passing it round, and I would certainly never go near LSD again.

I must have fallen asleep that night, eventually. When I woke up I tried to shrug it off as a bad dream or a nightmare, but it wouldn't go away. It started coming back: I would switch in and, suddenly, I would be seeing things in that way again. It was terrifying beyond belief. I would think, 'It's not like that, it's not like that,' and try to fend it off, but it would develop into a panic attack. My heart would race and I would run around the place trying to hang on to something, just rushing around in circles going, 'Argh, what can I do? What can I do?' It didn't matter where I was, I could be in the middle of London, in a shop, or I could be out in the country, or in a garden. I do remember that I didn't like neon lights - they really affected me.

That's when it started, the whole period of panic attacks that lasted up until the end of the 1970s. From that moment on it used to happen all the time, no matter where I was. It was an abrupt, harsh discovery of my place on planet Earth, not just physically but spiritually, in terms of human exist­ence. From early on I'd loved watching the sky, I had a love of what's out there and a fascination for what is here. Suddenly it became excruciatingly scary, as it finally sunk in what our existence really is. On top of this was the stress I was still feeling because of my mother. From beginning life as a child who didn't know what fear was, I suddenly became afraid of everything.

I'd experienced nightmares in the past; this was like my worst nightmare come true."

From Michael Caine's "The Elephant to Hollywood" - Favourite Movies of All Time

В конце своей автобиографии Майкл Кейн, являясь заядлым киноманом приводит два списка любимых фильмов как вообще, так и со своим участием, давая небольшие комментарии, почему это вдруг так случилось. Несмотря на ожидаемую в целом некую старомодно-классичность пристрастий и прочие побочные причины "фаворитности" выбранных фильмов, этот обзор очень даже интересен.

  My Top Ten Favourite Movies of All Time . . .

All my life I have been an avid movie fan, which is why, I suppose, I ended up in the business. I love movies – I can even find something to like in the bad ones – but I do have an all-time Top Ten. Here they are in reverse order . . .

10. Tell No One, 2006
This is a French film and one of the best thrillers I have ever seen. It’s adapted from the brilliant novel by American thriller writer Harlan Coben – who actually appears in the film as the man who follows our hero, Bruno, into the station – and I’ve always been a bit surprised that it wasn’t bought by an American studio. Bruno is played by François Cluzet, who gives it a slight American feel as he looks very like Dustin Hoffman, and the great English turned French actress, Kristin Scott Thomas, co-stars. The blurb alone is enough to draw you in: ‘A husband and wife, out together, are badly beaten by a person unknown. The husband survives, but the wife dies. The wife’s father identifies her body and they bury her. Seven years later, the husband gets an email from his dead wife saying, “Meet me in the park in an hour.”’ I couldn’t resist – the film is stunning.

9. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948
This is a movie involving two of my favourite artists: Humphrey Bogart, whom I never got to meet, and John Huston, who directed me in two of my favourite films, The Man Who Would Be King and Escape to Victory. As I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that if God spoke he would sound like John Huston, a deep voice of experience and wisdom and in this film you can actually hear John’s voice. He plays a man who keeps getting hit on by Bogart’s character, who is begging in the street, and John gives him a lecture. I’d listen to a lecture from John Huston any day – his voice is completely mesmerising. I first saw when it came out – and I felt it was a metaphor for my own life. It features a load of dumb sods searching for a treasure; and there I was, a dumb sod searching for my own treasure – only in my case, that was a career in the movies. The crazy old man, played by Walter Huston, knows where the treasure is – and fortunately for me, as I went through my life I met my own Walter Hustons. There is a great scene in the movie when Bogart says, ‘We’re never going to find the gold’ and Huston starts to laugh and he does this little skip and dance, saying, ‘You’re so dumb, you don’t even see the riches you’re treadin’ on with your own feet . . .’ and Bogart and Tim Holt look mystified and then they look down and they are standing on it . . .

8. Gone with the Wind, 1939
This was the first movie in colour to win a Best Picture Oscar and, taking inflation into account, it is still the highest grossing picture ever. The book, by Margaret Mitchell, was turned down by every major Hollywood studio and picked up in the end by the independent producer David O. Selznick. Selznick was a genius at doing movies on the cheap. Apart from using the front door of his own studio as the front door to Tara, he saved money at both ends in the scene of the burning of Atlanta by setting fire to several old sets he wanted to get rid of on the back lot. The first director on the movie was a brilliant, gentle and very sensitive man called George Cukor, and although Selznick fired him and replaced him with Victor Fleming, a brusque, tough, action director, neither Vivien Leigh nor Olivia de Havilland liked the change and continued to seek private direction from Cukor. This was also the film in which Clark Gable said ‘Damn’. It had, of course, been said in a film before, but it caused controversy because Gone with the Wind was so big . . . I can watch this movie time and time again without tiring of it. It is a timeless classic.

7. All That Jazz, 1979
This is my favourite musical and Bob Fosse, who directed and choreographed it, is my favourite choreographer – he also directed two of my other favourite musicals, Cabaret, which won eight Oscars, including one for Bob for Best Director, and Sweet Charity, which had my friend and mentor Shirley Maclaine dancing up a storm and featured a great number by Sammy Davis Junior, ‘The Rhythm of Life’. But it is the music and dancing in All That Jazz that makes it stand out for me – that, plus the performance of Roy Schneider in the lead. When I was an out-of-work actor I had worked as a stage hand on Bob Fosse’s stage production of The Pajama Game, but I didn’t get to know him personally until he and I and several other actors danced with the Rockettes’ chorus line at Radio City Music Hall in 1985. We were lined up in alphabetical order and I was next to Charles Bronson – who turned out to be an unexpectedly great chorus dancer. We were down one end with the slightly older chorus ladies, who were known as the Dirty Dozen. A bit further down the line, Rock Hudson got the younger fresher ones – which was a bit of a waste, come to think of it.

6. The Maltese Falcon, 1941
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:-))) Мне видимо повезло генетически - алкоголь на меня никогда не оказывает маньяческого психотичного воздействия "надо еще ЕЩЕ! ЕЩОООО!!!!" ... я по правде всегда с удивлением и интересом смотрю на тех, кто вштыривается под алко так сурово, теряет себя, все остатки сознания, приличия и интеллекта, превращается в агонизирующее обезьяно-животное и бегает ищет чертиков, а затем прячется от них... а потом на следующее утро пытается вспомнить по рассказам окружающих как и где он был и что натворил...  но как говорится, зарекаться в таких опасных делах конечно-же невозможно и совершенно глупо...это всегда игра с огнем