The Psychedelic Experience in 'We Were the Universe'

Review of We Were the Universe (2024) by Kimberly King Parsons

In her new novel We Were the Universe (2024), Kimberly King Parsons renders the psychedelic experience whimsical, feral and queer.

Parsons’ narrator Kit, a young Texas mother coping with the death of her sister, insists LSD prepared her for childbirth. “I’m so glad I’ve done acid,” she thinks. “Nothing prepares you for childbirth more. The violent weirdness, how LSD lasts and lasts. You’re done with it long before it’s done with you. Just like childbirth.” Startling comparisons such as Parsons’ would never show up on Erowid or Reddit. How to Change Your Mind neglected the topic of childbirth, even though there’s evidence for feminine uses of psychedelics going back thousands of years. Peyote is still used today to aid childbirth, induce lactation, and ease the discomfort of menopause.

Parsons’ narrator continues, “Psychedelics prepare you for the craziest thing imaginable on this earth: a new human tunneling through an older human’s body. Somehow, my extensive recreational drug use led me to a completely unmedicated delivery. I turned out to be one of those women who refuse the epidural, who call contractions ‘rushes,’ who insist pain isn’t painful.  Trips taught me how to sit with discomfort. You can’t leave, so you might as well soak in it. In many ways, I found labor to be even easier than LSD…”

Compared to Parsons, the male-dominated popular depiction of the psychedelic experience is sour milk. As someone who spent more than four years in underground psychedelic therapy, I find Parsons’ account to be truer to the psychedelic experience than the over-intellectualized and masculinized chatter of the current so-called renaissance. In truth, the psychedelic experience is sensual, and although often derided as unserious, engaging with sensuality is so much more fun than staring at your wool pants during a drug trip. Plus, almost no one comes to psychedelics in the idealized and highly scripted ways the old men of the renaissance describe. Most of us have experiences more like Kit’s.

The narrator Kit comes to psychedelics the way many people do: outside of a ceremony and without access to the strange, dissociative clinical model touted by organizations like Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, now a private company called Lykos Therapeutics. Kit goes on her first trips as an adolescent, without much consideration for set or setting. A pink rug, a young man named Big Large who doubles as a trip sitter, and the narrator’s sister, help her through her first trips. “We sat on the screened-in porch and let our identities touch,” Parsons writes of using psychedelics with her sister, Julie, who becomes an addict and dies. “We comingled and passed the dessert between us, understanding that whipped cream was a gift from a cow, that strawberries were magic, something to hold in your hand, contemplate and savor, every seed a different rainbow color.” The sensuality in Parsons’ trip descriptions is palpable, and although fictional, more realistic.

In today’s popular accounts of psychedelics, addiction is rarely if ever mentioned, and never connected to the human desire to experience altered states and the sensuality they provoke. The grandpas of psychedelics tout them as panaceas, squashing alternate perspectives to achieve their aims of decriminalization and wealth. Some of these people want to control the narrative and access to psychedelics in a way that, according to We Were the Universe, can’t really be done because the substances themselves control the plotline. “Psychedelics squash shame and guilt, help you make sense of things that make no sense,” Parsons writes. “A trip is a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end—a narrative that unfolds perfectly, a plot tailored for you, telling you exactly what you need to hear.”

The sensuality of Kit’s drug trips undergirds the feral universe of the novel. Parsons never depicts psychedelics as cure-alls or scientific breakthroughs. Instead, We Were the Universe pushes against pop spirituality’s claims about healing in ways that are funny and true, refusing to eschew the mess, blood or sex. “For me, psychedelics have always been beneficial, therapeutic—and I’m referring to obliterative macrodoses, not those barely-feel-it micro-tinctures people blab about on public radio… Dropping acid was this magnificent clearing, a long white hand swiping layers of chalk from the blackboard of my brain. I could do it and come back clean, focused.”

Kit repeatedly lies to her sliding-scale therapist until the woman dumps her, proclaiming the narrator healed in one of the novel’s funniest moments. Meanwhile, Kit is binge-watching porn and wishing she could still use drugs and have sex with strangers, coping mechanisms from her younger years. In fact, it seems Kit doesn’t heal in the novel—that healing in the contemporary pop spirituality sense is not even desirable. It would mean living a life denuded, numbed out, rife with unfortunate language like manifesting and intentionality. Instead of healing, Kit combines and creates. Instead of healing, she cracks jokes.

“Rich people travel when they get depressed, but there are much cheaper solutions,” Parsons writes. “My coping mechanisms used to be psychedelics and/or sex with strangers, though marriage and motherhood have wrenched those from me.”

Kit is all too aware that such sensuality appears unseemly to those living in consensus reality.  “My high school guidance counselor called me pleasure seeking and I still don’t see what’s so wrong about that,” she reflects. Kit doesn’t give up porn, and although her husband knows about her habit, she downplays it after she becomes a mother. “Even when I’m alone, I watch my selections without sound, in case a participant says something accidentally or genuinely disturbing. Catchy as a TV jingle, a snippet of dialogue from an early, formative scene haunts me still: ‘All right, boys,’ said one gangbanger to his brethren, ‘let’s get in those guts and bust some nuts.’ Now I’m a muter for life.”

The narrator’s desire is wide-ranging, impossible to blot out, she says. It’s the sort of question that pervades We Were the Universe and the psychedelic experience: Why should we blot out our desires? If we weren’t so busy fitting ourselves into boxes, maybe we’d find, like Kit, that our desires defy categorization. Parsons describes an adolescent relationship with another girl this way: “This girl and I wouldn’t have called ourselves queer. We called what we were doing ‘preparing.’ We prepared for all of ninth grade, half of tenth. We were very, very prepared.” Kit routinely fantasizes about men and women, and everyone in between.

Meanwhile, psychedelics ignite extra-sensory perception in the psychic space of the novel, the sort of thing Rupert Sheldrake talks openly about but that the rest of us are best off rendering in fiction. Kit develops telepathy with her sister while Julie is alive, and sees her ghost after her sister dies. Although frequently misunderstood in ordinary, everyday life, Kit’s fuzzy boundaries also work as superpowers. Parsons depicts enmeshment as sensual, erotic, feral and ecological—in the novel it becomes a fundamental component of motherhood, creativity and the psychedelic experience.

Kit describes herself as a “curious, boundaryless person.” On page 142 she likens herself to an “adrift brain in a jar. I used to try to pour myself into other people’s bodies. Entering a person, being entered, it stops time, bends it. This sounds like hippy shit, but that sensation lasts longer, goes deeper with psychedelics—the total dissolution of the personal body, the safety of being swallowed by a universal one.” She sees motherhood in a similar light. “Once we’ve been inside each other, we’re permeable, we’re mesh, forever.”

Kit describes enmeshment with her dead sister during an acid trip this way on pages 71 to 72: “It was like an open door between adjoining rooms. I flowed into Julie’s space and she flowed into mine.” If there is any healing for Kit in the novel, it comes from her enmeshment with the people she loves, from her ability—borne in psychedelic trips—to experience the love for her sister even after her sister is gone.

Best-selling nonfiction books on psychedelics insist everything between their covers is real and true, but this move collapses the narrative. We Were the Universe shows how much more space is available when we return to sensuality and allow boundaries to blur. Profoundly whimsical, the novel reflects the psychedelic experience in the realest way possible.