CHAPTER FOUR

TRAVELOGUE

Journeying Underground

MY PLAN HAD BEEN TO volunteer for one of the Hopkins or NYU
experimental trials. If I was going to have my own guided psychedelic
journey, a harrowing prospect under any circumstances, I very much
liked the idea of traveling in the company of trained professionals close
by a hospital emergency room. But the aboveground researchers were no
longer working with “healthy normals.” This meant that if I hoped to have
the journey I had heard so much about, it would have to take place
underground. Could I find a guide willing to work with a writer who
planned to publish an account of his journey, and would that person be
someone I felt sufficiently comfortable with and confident in to entrust
with my mind? The whole endeavor was fraught with uncertainty and
entailed risks of several kinds—legal, ethical, psychological, and even
literary. For how do you put into words an experience said to be
ineffable?
“Curiosity” is an accurate but tepid word for what drove me. By now, I
had interviewed at length more than a dozen people who had gone on
guided psychedelic journeys, and it was impossible to listen to their
stories without wondering what the journey would be like for one’s self.
For many of them, these were among the two or three most profound
experiences of their lives, in several cases changing them in positive and
lasting ways. To become more “open”—especially at this age, when the
grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable
—was an appealing prospect. And then there was the possibility, however
remote, of having some kind of spiritual epiphany. Many of the people I’d
interviewed had started out stone-cold materialists and atheists, no more
spiritually developed than I, and yet several had had “mystical