Also:

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: "A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”

-- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

I wonder if both stories are real, or one is a memetic mutation of the other.

Novel is easy. If you're not constrained by what's coherent and sensible, worlds of possibility open up before you. They're just not worlds you're going to be taking anything useful back from. I've spent a lot of time wandering around alone in the woods with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic (he was my field ecology lab partner,) and by ordinary standards he certainly seemed like a constant fountain of novel ideas, but that was because he was sharing with me a perception of reality that was skewed in a maladaptive way relative to everyone else's. All of his novel ideas were crazy.

The fact that nearly everyone in computer graphics in California at the time was using psychedelic drugs seems possibly significant, but I'm inclined to discount self assessments of whether they're actually useful for the creative process more or less entirely. People have a pronounced tendency to say that psychedelics help them be creative, but I haven't seen any evidence yet that leads me to believe that they're actually having more worthwhile ideas than they are when off of drugs.

When you're constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it's easy to conclude that you're in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound. It seems a priori much more probable to me that introducing foreign chemicals into your brain would interfere with your faculty for recognizing profundity than that it would improve your faculty for generating it. The example given by the interviewee of his own work influenced by psychedelics

About the time that chaos theory was discovered by the scientific community, and the chaos revolution began in 1978, I apprenticed myself to a neurophysiologist and tried to construct brain models made out of the basic objects of chaos theory. I built a vibrating fluid machine to visualize vibrations in transparent media, because I felt on the basis of direct experience that the Hindu metaphor of vibrations was important and valuable. I felt that we could learn more about consciousness, communication, resonance, and the emergence of form and pattern in the physical, biological, social and intellectual worlds, through actually watching vibrations in transparent media ordinarily invisible, and making them visible.

Is definitely not something I would regard as a good idea on the face of things. It's an idea, and I can imagine that they made a lot of progress in computer graphics at the time by working on the programs to do this, but believing that visualizing vibrations in transparent fluid would give some valuable insight into human consciousness on the basis of Hindu religious metaphor strikes me as a case of really bad scientific intuition.