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Story about a man who uses anti-hallucinogenic drugs and begins to see the nature of reality?




Old story involving a man who acquires an anti-hallucigen and peels one drug-induced illusion after another from his world:



  • New cars become old cars, then clunkers, and finally people pretending to drive cars while running down the street

  • Fancy restaurants become dirty dives before dissolving into places where food is dispensed through feeding tubes.


I think it may be by P.K. Dick—it reminds me of his short story Faith of Our Fathers (1967).



Answer



Sounds like The Futurological Congress (1971) by Stanisław Lem.


From Wikipedia:




With his first sip of up'n'at'm, Tichy watches as the gilded surroundings of the five-star restaurant they are in evaporates into a dingy concrete bunker and his stuffed pheasant turns into 'the most unappetizing gray-brown gruel, which stuck in globs to my tin — no longer silver — fork'.


But this first dose is just the beginning of Tichy's journey. He sees that people do not drive cars or ride in elevators, but they run in the streets and climb the walls of empty elevator shafts, which explains why everyone in this new world is so out of breath. Robots whip people in the street and protect order. Through successive doses of up'n'at'm, Tichy sees increasingly horrible visions of the world, climaxing in a frozen horrorscape where people sleep blissfully in the snow and the police robots are revealed to be people who are convinced they are robots. The frozen state of the world explains why he has always found the new world to be so cold.



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