In his book, "Light My Fire: My Life With The Doors," keyboard player Ray Manzarek describes a reoccurring dream he has about Jim Morrison and the band. The Doors are still around in the present, making great music. Every once in a while, Morrison tries to float into the light, but Manzarek grabs his ankle and grounds him again, keeping the music going all the while.

This seems to be Manzarek's preoccupation throughout the book - keeping the myth of Morrison alive, and showing how he could always keep things together. He was the one who convinced Morrison he had a great singing voice. He was the one who let loose Jim, the poet, on the masses who were watching British white guys trying to play soul. He found Robby Krieger and John Densmore to bring together all four points and "complete the diamond," as he puts it. And The Doors would change the world.

Morrison's fatal flaw, according to Manzarek, was the split in his personality. Jim was a sensitive and adventurous poet, well read, intellectual, and on the cutting edge of art. Jimbo, as he is called in the book, is the Florida redneck whose father pushed him toward military service; a hard-drinking, abusive man on the edge of destroying himself and everyone around him. And Manzarek was always there, leading the charge to pull him from one edge and push him to the other.

What was on the other edge? It was art and the collective consciousness. The soul of the sixties that everybody tries hard to recreate now by holding another Woodstock and releasing Buffalo Springfield songs as Public Enemy songs. It was a dream back then that a lot of people bought into, Manzarek among them. Manzarek describes how he found the dream after his first LSD trip.

Here's what happened to me on that fateful acid trip. After falling in love with the sun (talk about pure God energy; the closest approximation to the secret of life is the solar energy coming off that great golden globe that shines down on us all) I was lying on the floor with my eyes closed . . . and I had entered the womb. I had gone back to the womb. Lying there in a fetal position, I had gone back into my mother and was completely safe and secure. I knew I was Ray Manzarek, in Venice and on LSD, but I was experiencing the womb again. I opened one eye to look at the setting sun, but I closed it quickly. I wasn't ready to leave yet. It was not my time of emergence. I hadn't cooked enough. The child was still undone. Like bread not yet golden.

It seems like Ray could use a few more minutes to cook. His dream is rife with contradictions. Pot and LSD are the drugs that open up the mind, but Andy Warhol and the sophisticated New York crowd were evil, pill-popping alcoholics. That's what Manzarek was always trying to save Jim from - to keep him from becoming Jimbo. It's a dichotomy nearly as silly and altruistic as the good Superman versus the bad Superman. If only Morrison would get away from his redneck alcohol and those East Coast, big city drugs, he could be safe sitting on the beach doing LSD and "the keys to the doors of perception," as Manzarek calls them. Later on, he calls LSD a "great therapeutic tool" and rails against the "fundamentalist, fascist guardians" who took it away by making it illegal. Got that kids - just do the good drugs.

His weak defense of this stance is to say that perhaps LSD is dangerous for some. To his credit, Manzarek says people operating heavy machinery like wrecking balls probably shouldn't take LSD because they might knock down the wrong building. What a wacky guy, huh?

The name dropping in "Light My Fire" is enough to make Kato Kalin cringe. Manzarek mentions James Joyce, Allen Ginsburg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Howlin' Wolf, John Coltrane, and Carl Jung, among others, sometimes in the same paragraph. Jung is a reoccurring theme in Doors' music, though Manzarek never really explains the connection he sees. He does, however, chastise the New York critics for not understanding the Doors, being too involved in the "Freudian, Dylan-is-the-best" scene to get it. And let us not forget Dionysus, the god Morrison was channeling on stage and in the studio. All the Greek poets combined never mentioned Dionysus in all their collective works as often as Manzarek does here.

Manzarek apparently still holds a grudge against Oliver Stone for getting everything wrong in his movie The Doors, and rightfully so. However, the reference pops up randomly throughout the book. He calls Stone "Oliver 'Bonehead' Stone," "Mr. Two Face," "Ham-hands," and a fascist. At one point, it seems like he's going to call Stone out to a fight behind the monkey bars after homeroom.

There are several scenes that might be enjoyable to hardcore Doors fans wanting an insiders look at what happened. There are even a few moments where Manzarek actually seems to miss Morrison as a friend, rather than as a member of The Doors - his meal ticket for the past thirty years. But these moments are overwhelmed by tangents about the "lovers vs. the salesman of junk," Manzarek's personal philosophies, and his hawking Doors videos every few pages for the last few chapters.

A few myths are exploded in "Light My Fire," much to the chagrin of every college freshman with a blacklight Morrison poster. Still, the overall myth of Jim Morrison, the wildman/poet/rock star is kept neatly intact. If you want, you can rent the video on Universal. Read the book. Ray can tell you where to get it.