The influence of hallucination

If you’ve seen the Oliver Stone movie or Wayne’s World 2, than you are no doubt familiar with a recurring theme in much of Jim Morrison’s lyrics and poems. That of the family of bleeding Indians he saw in an accident on the side of the highway as a child. Interestingly, his family does not recall it happening in the way he told it. In one of Morrison’s biographies No One Here Gets Out Alive, his sister is quoted as saying “He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road and I don’t even know if that’s true”. The incident occurred in 1947, when Morrison was only four years old. He claims it was the most formative event of his life and that the spirit of an Indian, a shaman, had entered his soul. Throughout the rest of his short life, he would continue to have a strong attachment to Native American culture and his work was heavily influenced by this traumatic memory.