jerry garcia on comas

via David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick’s Voices from the Edge:

It just gave me a greater admiration for the incredible baroque possibilities of mentation. The mind is so incredibly weird. The whole process of going into coma was very interesting, too. It was a slow onset — it took about a week — and during this time I started feeling like the vegetable kingdom was speaking to me.

It was communicating in comic dialect in iambic pentameter. So there were these Italian accents and German accents, and it got to be this vast garbling. Potatoes and radishes and trees were all speaking to me. It was really strange. It finally just reached hysteria, and that’s when I passed out and woke up in the hospital.