Mara Vance

Consciousness Editor

Mara Vance covers consciousness, psychedelics, and dreams. She follows the research where it is solid, says so where it is not, and keeps a soft spot for the experiments that should never have been approved. Her beat runs from sleep labs and isolation tanks to the long, strange history of people trying to study the mind from the inside.

Stories by Mara Vance

• October 27, 1970: The Law That Put Psychedelics in Schedule I Nixon's signing remarks covered heroin and pep pills. The law he signed put LSD, peyote and psilocybin in the strictest drug category there is.
• Timothy Leary: From Harvard Lecturer to "Most Dangerous Man in America" He went from Harvard lecturer to LSD evangelist, Supreme Court winner, prison escapee and informant. Nixon's famous label tells only part of the story.
• Did Kekulé Really Dream the Benzene Ring? A chemist said a snake biting its tail showed him benzene's structure. He told the story 25 years late, and no one else saw it.
• The Red Book: Jung's Private Descent Into the Unconscious Carl Jung spent sixteen years painting his own visions into a red leather folio. Then it sat unread for half a century.
• María Sabina and the Mushroom Ceremony That Changed the West In 1955 a Mazatec healer let a New York banker join her mushroom rite. He became famous. Her house was burned.
• The Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes and the Voices of the Gods In 1976 a Princeton psychologist argued that the heroes of the Iliad were not conscious. Fifty years on, the idea refuses to die.
• MKUltra: The CIA's Secret Psychedelic Experiments For twenty years the CIA tested LSD on Americans, some of them unwitting. Then it destroyed the files. Here is what survived.
• Gateway Process: The Army Report That Tried to Explain Consciousness In 1983 an Army officer wrote up astral travel in memo format. What the famous Gateway report says, what page 25 held, and what science supports.
• What Jung Actually Meant by the Shadow Jung's shadow was a moral problem, not a journaling prompt, and it held more than darkness.
• Lucid Dreaming Was Proven in a Lab With a Flick of the Eyes In 1975 a sleeping man in Hull signaled to the waking world with his eyes, and a disputed experience became a measurable fact.
• John C. Lilly and the Invention of the Isolation Tank He built the float tank, tried to talk to dolphins, then lost the plot. What John C. Lilly got right, and what flotation research finds now.
• Did the Ancient Greeks Drink a Psychedelic at Eleusis? A sacred barley drink, a grain fungus and a secret kept for a thousand years: the ergot theory of the Mysteries, weighed fairly.
• Freud Versus Jung: Two Theories of What Dreams Are For One saw the dream as a disguise, the other as a correction. Then sleep science arrived and declined to pick a winner.
• The Hard Problem: Why Consciousness Still Has No Explanation In 1995 David Chalmers asked why brain activity feels like anything at all. Thirty years and one lost bet later, nobody has answered him.
• Bicycle Day: Albert Hofmann and the Accidental Discovery of LSD In 1938 a Swiss chemist made a compound nobody wanted. Five years later he looked again, and rode home on a bicycle in terror.
• Synchronicity: Jung, Pauli and the Meaning of Coincidence A beetle at a window, a Nobel physicist, and an idea that statisticians have never accepted.
• Tibetan Dream Yoga: A Thousand Years of Waking Up Asleep Long before sleep labs, Tibetan yogis trained to stay conscious in dreams. Lucidity was only the first step, and death was the real subject.