I don't believe HP Lovecraft ever got his hands on any DMT, but after listening to some audiobooks of a few very excellent stories featuring the protagonist Randolph Carter I am wholly convinced that Lovecraft was at the very least clued into what could be called the psychedelic impulse.
Before I go on, I would like to recommend the narration of these stories on the YouTube channel Horrorbabble. It was an excellent way to take in these masterpieces without an actual hard copy of the books and perfect to listen to, perhaps even while tripping if not too inundated by the dosage. Anybody here with the most remote interest in fantasy and cosmic literature concerning consciousness and existentialism should listen to this series. It's about 6 hours in total and you don't necessarily need to read/listen to them all to get the gist, but it is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore... I will give a brief summary and review of the series of as a whole.
The series revolves around a man named Randolph Carter. He is a prolific dreamer, author, thinker, and ultimately a mystic. The first two story, 'The statement of Randolph Carter' gives some clues into this character. Here Carter is giving a statement to the police who have found him passed out on the road and a man Carter had been seen traveling with missing. Carter accounted to them his experience with another man who is given to the pursuit of the mystical in a remote ancient cemetery. Here Carter experiences a dark anomaly that ultimately kills his companion and hints at dark things beyond this world. Prior to this, Carter and this man had been dabbling in the pursuit of the esoteric knowledge of the unknown, and had acquired a strange book in language entirely foreign to earth, and resolved to go to this cemetery to find a secret hinted at in this book. This experience later connects a much grander plot for Carter.
The second story 'The Unnameable' is essentially a debate between the whimsical and fantasy inclined Carter against a high brow 'rationalist' about his writing style, and it reveals key details about Carter's character. His opponent argues that Carter's literature, which often used a device in which Carter's characters encountered scenes and vistas so shocking to the human senses that the character could not fully describe what they saw (something akin to the unreliable narrator idea) was assinine and that this concept of something 'unnameable' was wholly ridiculous. Carter defends his writing by reminding his opponent of a well known urban legend in their community that defied reason, and coincidentally since this debate was in a setting in connection to this legend, the two characters are soon attacked by that very type of thing Carter wrote of- the unnameable.
These two shorter stories set the scene for Carter as a man with a keen fascination in for inconceivable and somebody who is willing to go to great lengths for further understanding and knowledge of the universe. These hints consolidate in the third and longest installment in this series, 'The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath'. Unlike the previous two stories, this story takes place almost entirely in Randolph Carter's dreams.
The story opens with this vivid description of a city Randolph Carter had been dreaming of. Carter prays to the gods of his dream world that he could see more of this dream city, but instead finds himself incapable of dreaming of it again. Incensed, Carter decides that he is going to go confront the gods at their very doorstep, a hidden city of the gors high up a tall peak across a cold desert wasteland, a place known as Unknown Kadath.
Only one problem, Carter doesn't exactly know where this place is. To find it he goes on a grand dream quest not dissimilar to but far more bizarre than 'The Odyssey'. I won't spoil it for you too much because it's glorious and wacky and vivid and colorful, but one sequence involves an army of housecats saving Carter from a group of demon worshipping moon aliens that had kidnapped him. Sound interesting? Read this story, you will not regret it. By the way, MEGA SPOILERS AHEAD.
At the end of this grand dream journey, Carter finds his way atop Unknown Kadath and collapses at the feet of a powerful God, Nyarlathotep. However he is not of Earth's gods, but of a more powerful cosmic alien god sort. The god explains to Carter that the city he dreamed of was so splendid that when he prayed about it the Gods abandoned Unknown Kadath to revel in it eternally. He goes on to reveal to Carter that this splendid city wasn't a mere dream, but a summation of all of Carter's boyhood experience; the hills and forests of quaint New England... A product of childhood nostalgia and fancy. Nyarlathotep then advises Carter to look to his past to return to his dream city, and send the gods back to Unknown Kadath where they belong. The story then concludes with Carter waking up in his home... In Boston.
This story really resonated with me and the impact hit hard. I took am an imaginative person who often envisions vivid and colorful and fanciful settings. My time in Hawaii has been sort of my own dream quest, through a world much more vivid and bizarre than my Midwestern home state... only to realize that so much of what lets me appreciate nature here is something I had in me since childhood on those spring and autumn days in Ohio woods. And I do think that these things I imagine are derived from things I saw as a child be it nature my environment or even the video games and literature and art that I took in. I do think that over time through our experience we do forge out our own little world (which we sometimes access directly on psychedelics ;p ) that we mentally inhabit. It's just, some tend to it more or less than others. In fact, even in Randolph Carter himself eventually did lose that world... For a time-
In the fourth story, 'The Silver Key', it details Carter's eventual disconnection from this fanciful dream world from the previous story. He succumbs to society, science, 'rationalism', and abandons his youthful world of dreams. The story goes on to detail Carter's disillusionment with this 'civil society' he had ditched his dreams to take part in. This section of the story could be described as scathing social commentary about the state of affairs in the typical western society. It poses many questions about the validity of what we consider to be 'sane, reasonable, correct, ect' and presents the idea that perhaps these 'fanciful' things of dreams and art and poetry and mysticism are perhaps just as valid as what society calls 'correct'. Ultimately, Carter decides that he would rather return to his world of dream.
Turns out, one of Carter's ancestors had made a key and parchment covered in some strange language not found on earth... The same language his unfortunate companion had in the book from the first story. And this key was capable of opening the door of his dreams up to him again. To open this gate, Carter travels to his ancestral home in New England and goes into an ancient cave that his ancestor (who was a wizard fleeing the Salem trials) had left there. The story ends with Carter having gone missing, last seen going into a New England forest carrying this silver key and leaving behind the strange esoteric parchment in his car.
Now this is where it gets psychedelic. The fifth and final story 'Through the gates of the silver key' opens in a room where the estate of the recently missing Randolph Carter is about to be split for four distant relatives. Also in the room is two men opposing this partition, whom were in contact with a time traveling Randolph Carter, now in alien form. But for the time being, alien Carter is disguised as an Indian (literally). Unbeknownst that this is a time traveling alien Carter, the men in the room hear Carter's recounting of what happened to him after he took the silver key into that cave.
Again, I don't want to spoil the rich vivid imagery and awesomeness... But Carter goes through a full on hyperspace sword and sorcery ritual of passage, where he is put through trials and tribulations by a council of cosmic space gods so that he can pass through the gate and access the ultimate supreme being. It's indescribably epic so I don't want to spoil it for those who do plan on reading it.
Anyway, Carter passes their trials and ends up essentially floating in the void, where the only thing he can feel is this sort of resonance and vibration or wave that is communicating with him through his human framework of understanding; a framework that is promptly shattered when he realizes that he is merely a facet of an indescribable multiplicity of Randolph Carters which is in of itself merely an archetype of a vast and indescribable cosmic supreme being of oneness. It then went on to describe that 3 dimensioal space is merely a slice of a much greater dimensional space much like a 2D slash in the sand, which is in of itself a slice of dimensions infinitely greater. That's right, Randolph Carter had a full on DMT ego death through sheer force of will, and this was written by man who apparently shunned all drugs. An author apparently enjoyed greatly by the one and only Terrence Mckenna.
So Carter surrenders to the void and accepts his ego death on one condition - that he gets to be an alien wizard from then on. Well, the supreme cosmic being accepted this and a space wizard he was. However this got old. The Randolph Carter facet of the cosmic consciousness was now in spiritual warfare with the alien space wizard's own sense of self. Then Carter essentially hijacks this alien's consciousness and uses the technology of that planet to send him back to earth and disguise himself as a human, to confront these men before him and tell him this story to take back his estate. Apparently, that parchment Carter left behind before his disappearance had on it a spell to return to his human Randolph Carter form. And he left it behind. But here he was as this alien, telling you his own story.
Well, the room of men went into something of a hysteria after Carter rips off his disguise revealing that he is in a fact a time traveling alien. And thus concludes this mindbending, vivid, poetic, and awesomely bizarre tale of Randolph Carter. I appreciate all who read this far. I feel really strongly about this work and really wanted to share it with you all who I'm sure will appreciate it too as fellow hyperspace travelers. Hope you enjoy and I do implore you check it out.
That's all folks!