John C. Lilly's opinion about this film

Omni Interview, January 1983

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

Full interview: http://www.futurehi.net/docs/Lilly_Omni_Interview.html

-

OMNI

The Ken Russell/Paddy Chayefsky film Altered States closely resembles your life. What did you think of it?

Lilly

I think they did a good job. The hallucination scenes are much better than anything ever produced before. I understand that some of the crew, the actors, and the producers were trained on K(etamine). The tank scenes were fine -- except that in reality there are no vertical tanks, only horizontal ones -- and the film implied that use of the tank itself would cause those out-of-the-body trips, which it doesn't.

The scene in which the scientist becomes cosmic energy and his wife grabs him and brings him back to human form is straight out of my Dyadic Cyclone [1976]. Toni did that for me. As for the scientist's regression into an apelike being, the late Dr. Craig Enright, who started me on K while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, suddenly "became" a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, "Where the hell were you?" He said, "I became a prehominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away." I said, "If you do that again, I'll kick you in the ass." He laughed.