Isabel Allende and Ayahuasca.

London's Sunday Telegraph reported this interesting bit on Isabel Allende's experience with ayahuasca, to fight a bad case of the writer's block.

But after forcing down the foul-tasting brew, she was catapulted to a place so dark her husband feared he had 'lost his wife to the world of spirits'. Her life flashed before her as the hallucinogen took hold. She faced demons, saw herself as a terrified four-year-old and curled up on the floor, shivering, retching and muttering for two days.'I think I went through an experience of death at a certain point, when I was no longer a body or a soul or a spirit or anything,' Allende says matter-of-factly. 'There was just a total, absolute void that you cannot even describe because you are not. And I think that's death.'Nevertheless, the process proved transformative. Allende emerged aching but lucid and was able to complete [a trilogy she was writing], now being adapted for film by the co-producers of The Chronicles of Narnia.

In somewhat unrelated news, Joe Rogan is known to be an active defendant of legalized use of DMT, the main psychoactive component of ayahuasca. He owns an isolation tank (which he put on sale, if you're interested). The state of sense deprivation will release our brain's own DMT, dimethyltryptamine (trippy name, I know). A bit like a Californian new age twist on ayahuasca, one who enters the tank will undergo, after a few minutes in, an introspective journey, confronted with oneself. People living with regrets, suppressed memories and emotions tend to be revulsed by the experience. On the other hand, people with open minds will embrace the experience almost to a spiritual extent. No matter how you take it, it turns out to be formative. I plan to try it.