the closest thing to drugs you can get without being drugs

I read with mild sadness about the death of the author Robert Anton Wilson - perhaps best known for his novels The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, and Cosmic Trigger. While there will be writers far better able to eulogize Mr. Wilson,I felt it warranted mention and a note of my own fascination with his works.

I'd read Schrödinger's Cat twice; it is quite simply about nothing so far as I can tell. There were three things that struck me most. First, a silly pun, a monk named Ped Xing who would channel himself into various characters at various times. Second, was the way in which the story's Eigenstate would collapse and result in the same story only slightly differently.

The most confounding aspect was that while reading this book, I would have terrible nightmares of non-specific content - in particular they were not about the novel. I am of the impression that Wilson managed to underlie the story with a subtext that twiddled some part of my brain. Knowing what little I do about him, it is fully expected that if anyone could do that, Wilson could. I know this sounds like backward masking on records or other such nonsense, and being of a skeptical bent, I thought it coincidence. That is, until years later when I re-read Cat and thus began the nightmares again. Yes, I could have been expecting it and thus fulfilled it myself, no, this is not scientific in the least, and no, I don't have the deconstructionist or neuro-linguistic tools to figure it out. Yet, I still believe he'd done something to me without my knowledge through the mere written word. If that isn't high literary praise, I don't know what is.