“Believer: So the hallucinations were sort of a good thing?
”
Jim Woodring: Good? Who knows. But I came to regard them as not only a part of life but the most interesting part. Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of those visions or whatever they were—neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn’t happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful. I loved the strangeness, the mystery they presented, and I searched for more of the same everywhere. If I was going up a staircase in the dark, I would dance with anticipatory excitement, like I did when we went to Disneyland. I called that prevision state a “sticky mood”—that sense that I was approaching knowledge. I loved it.
