In "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Feynman describes using LSD at the encouragement of John Lily, who claimed it would improve his thinking. Feynman tried it, and thought he'd solved a problem he was working on. As he was preparing to give a talk on the solution, he realized that he hadn't solved the problem; he'd only hallucinated that he had solved the problem. He was furious. That ended his experimentation with LSD. He wrote "I like to think, and I don't want to break the machine."
I loved that story in the book, because it was so much like my own experience with simple dreaming. We often hear about the brilliant creativity of our dreaming minds and the deep answers that await us if we'll pay attention to our dreams. I figured that was safer than drugs, so I kept a dream journal, because it was supposed to help you remember your dreams better (it does) and unleash the genius of your unconscious.
Over time, I had several instances of making some progress on a question (programming logic design, for example) as I was on the border of awake and asleep, but these were essentially just the result of awake-enough thinking through of a problem as I lay there just before I fell asleep.
But I did have a few instances of real solutions in my sleep that I thought were major breakthroughs. The funny thing was that almost the instant I woke up, I saw fatal flaws in those "breakthroughs" that had been completely invisible to the triumphant, celebrating genius that I was in the dream. Literally seconds after regaining consciousness, I would see how ridiculous my brilliant idea was because of something I had completely overlooked in my dream state but was instantly obvious in my waking state. (Waking up literally does bring some crucial part of your reasoning back online.)
After a few of these, I put away the dream journal with a chuckle and got another good laugh when I read about Feynman's experience with LSD. After my own experience, I can easily imagine how you might feel as though your intoxicated mind was somehow operating on a "higher plane" when cut free of the restraints of reality, but it doesn't mean that what you discover there is of any real value back in the world of reality.
As much fun as it sounds, with no benefits beyond the entertainment value and the serious risks involved--a top student and mentor of mine back in school raised his consciousness so high that he lost the ability to feed or dress himself in the real world ever again--I'll just stick to actual consciousness.
I learned OpenGL during an LSD trip. My subjective experience was that the information just went in without any resistance. I've since written a lot of OpenGL code, and I can run it all and see that it objectively works. Of course, I've learned hundreds of other things without taking any drugs. But, again subjectively, it's usually more incremental and seems like more of a struggle with attention and comprehension. At least, I can say that I didn't get anything wrong with OpenGL. I didn't hallucinate that I learned it. The programs I wrote immediately following the trip worked fine.
