Reddit reviews Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations

The first witnessing specifically for psychedelics as a 'gratuitous grace' in public came with the 1954 publication of Huxley's DOORS OF PERCEPTION - IOW before anyone ever heard of psychedelics. 1954 was before that particular word for drugs with LSD-like effects - had even been coined; as it was a year or two later and by none other than the Hux himself.

But witnessing to whoever, friends and family or perfect strangers at random (whoever will listen) about some amazing grace the blessed have 'received' - that hath delivered one from their formerly benighted condition 'once lost, now found' ('hallelujah') - didn't exactly originate with psychedelics.

That 'trip report' i.e. witnessing for - insert whatever source from which such blessing flows (whether icon or sacramental item) - pattern has quite a history. The 'trip' might be on foot, taking form of a closer walk with thee:

"He walked with me and he talked with me, and he told me ..." etc is bread & butter of the 'personal relationship with Christ' paleo-tradition of Old Time Religion; first-person narrated in witnessing testimonials, 'no, really.'

Outside religious contexts but 'stuck in the middle' of consciousness and altered states - phenomenological study of dreams/dreaming runs into a snag almost foreshadowing the 'witnessing' neotradition of psychedelic subculture's "Trip Report" - 'methodology.'

J. Allan Hobson, Edward F. Pace-Schott,and Robert Stickgold (in "Dreaming and the brain: Toward a cognitive neuroscience of conscious states") note 5 major methodological problems in attempted study of dreaming. The first one they cite:

2.3.1. The reduction of psychological states to narrative reports - ... the most profound problem in studying conscious states [is] reliance on verbal reports - reduction of conscious experience to prose. ... To describe mental states closer to dreaming than to waking mentation [e.g. religious conversion, near-death experience, functional psychosis, delirium, drug-induced conditions and other altered states of consciousness] - verbal retrospective reports are often considered inadequate. https://www.amazon.com/Sleep-Dreaming-Scientific-Advances-Reconsiderations/dp/0521008697

But such story-telling reductive 'witnessing' - whatever empirical failures it poses and however uncritical scientifically - is more than enough to found a 'community' tradition, of 'special' kind - like a religion.

A 20th century parallel to the psychedelic movement's advent and trajectory worth mentioning also comes to mind. A communitarian counterpart to the Trip Report tradition of discourse - as verbalizing tokens desperately trying to capture an experience like some moonbeam in its jar, only to 'fall back to earth' - is the 'ufo report' tradition.

That 'flying saucer' sighting reports i.e. verbal accounts of something inexplicable to the observer - present no data or evidence whatsoever on whatever mysterious stimulus prompts the reportage - is a point repeatedly emphasized by Jacques Vallee ("Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults") among others.

And for all one doesn't learn about the 'saucer' or whatever it was - a rich stewpot of evidence as to flawed human phenomena, processes and patterns - simmers.