NONFICTION - Feb. 23, 1992

FIRE IN THE BRAIN: Clinical Tales of Hallucination by Ronald K. Siegel (Dutton: $21; 256 pp.). Behind a burst of golden light, Moses appears, riding a bicycle and then exiting stage left. Following him is a throng of 39 tiny Moseses, riding tricycles with twinkling lights. Then a mountain springs up from the stage, and Porky Pig bursts from the top, stuttering, “That’s all folks!� Finally, a black curtain descends bearing dozens of eyes. While seemingly a bad marriage of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Bertold Brecht, this production actually was staged in UCLA professor Ronald Siegel’s brain after he had ingested a heavy dose of marijuana.

Siegel is sober enough--in these pages at least--to realize that no spiritual playwright told Porky and Moses what to do: They were merely “stored visual images,� he writes, “comprising elements from memories and fantasies now projected onto the mind’s eye.� Those who see drugs as a fast track to spiritual Epiphany are in fact Siegel’s favorite target here. Poking fun at a channeler whose trust he wins by standing naked in the California redwoods, for instance, Siegel watches the stringy-haired man contact his “daughter� Star, born “on the other side� in a Fourth Dimension three years ago. “Consciousness goes on,� Star reveals, “merges with everything and becomes part of everything, part of the universal vibration.�

Why Siegel lets Star drone on at such length will be a mystery to readers familiar with his last book, “Intoxication.� While that was an impressively focused and disciplined analysis of how safe drugs could be designed to help us explore “cities of the mind,� “Fire in the Brain� is a rambling collection of stories only loosely connected to the subject supposedly at hand: hallucination. What’s most conspicuously absent is the science. Siegel points out, for example, that the number of eyes in the aforementioned curtain (30) is precisely the same number given by his research subjects. But rather than attempting to explain this striking convergence, he merely remarks that the eyes might be some kind of primal memory, like Carl Jung’s mandalas.

Still, Siegel’s patients have gifted him with such marvelous material--from the actress who saw voodoo people throwing darts at her whenever the camera lights were turned on to the couple united and then torn apart by shared neuroses--that even his ramblings rank with the better medical nonfiction.