On Trial

This is the first chapter of "On Trial." To read the whole story, please follow this link to download the PDF or this link to download a Kindle file.

Note: The story in this book reflects the author's recollection of events. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted.

Dose #1 - the Cling

I’m sitting cross-legged on the plush blanket of a sofa-bed tucked in the back of the “Dosing Room,” a small, windowless, mostly gray, box-like space deep in the heart of the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Building’s basement, holding with intense seriousness and semi-fear a tangerine-sized abalone shell with 3 gray pills resting in it’s most convex nook, suddenly understanding the implications of the next 9 hours as the heavy blanket of personal responsibility appears in my chest. It’s 8:30 AM, Thursday, June 20th, 2024. To my right is a polarizing scene: printed across 90% of the ~16 foot long wall is a fairly mediocre photograph of a large California Coast Live Oak spiraling upwards towards an overexposed sunstar, with out of focus grass leading towards a tree-covered hill, and horses in the distance enjoying some of the well-deserved good eats of spring; blinking its green light and at the ready for indiscriminate use is the BPMOW (Blood Pressure Machine On Wheels - pronounced beepeemauw - which grows to become a complex and constant psychological point of consideration in the room for me); a recently cleaned nightstand to the right of the BPMOW has my water bottle, a worn but mostly empty leather journal, a so far unused box of tissues, black eyeshades for ultimate introspection, my personal emotional support item (a way cooler and larger abalone shell I found on a beach years ago), and an unremarkable lamp; at the far corner, past the Oak, is a white, boring sink, an electric kettle, and a paper plate with an assortment of tea bags; the lamp in the corner closest to me is set to the “maximum cozy” level. On the wall behind me are two more nature-inspired photographs: a snowy canopy of tree limbs under a sky of truly intense blue; a pre-dawn (or post-dusk) sky and a blue and ripley lake divided by a thin lakeshore in the middle of the frame. To my left: another nightstand but this one has a black speaker, black headphones, and a black ipod, followed by a tall cabinet that fills me with a vague curiosity, and finally the doorway into the rest of the basement and the world beyond closed nice and tight. 

“Let’s begin with a grounding exercise, if that’s ok?” 

That would be my temporary therapist and “guide” of sorts, Amy. She’s sitting directly in front of me and slightly to the left, her zippable shoes off and her black hair up in a messy pony bun, her eyes revealing an intense desire to help and a hint of condescension. To her right, facing me with a casual but palpable expectation is Jordan, a facilitator and assistant to Amy, age unclear but having a close-enough-to-my-age level of vocabulary and body language, hair also up and an iPad in hand. They’ll be with me through these next 9 hours. I can’t help but feel slightly self-conscious and awkward with their searching, professional eyes on me. I know that my words, actions, thoughts, reactions, and bodily readings will be studied and summarized and aggregated and correlated and visualized and triangulated and investigated and, eventually, published. But at the same time, I feel as though I have to act like that’s not the case, right, as unselfconsciously as possible? Because the whole point of a clinical trial like this one is to study human behavior precisely when it’s not being watched, in as natural a state as possible. Or is the truth that the way one reacts to this paradox is in fact more revealing than all of the rest? What are the moral obligations I should consider when my behavior may affect the future use of a substance that I find important - maybe necessary, powerful, beautiful, and slightly frightening - but that has had an uphill battle in past decades? What if this experience destabilizes me in a less-than-positive direction; what if I change for the worse? But then again, what if I don’t? What could happen then? 

“I invite you to close your eyes if you feel comfortable with that,” says Amy.

“Become aware of your breath, as you take a big inhale innnn aaaaaand a slow exhale out through your mouth.” 

“Remember your intention: to stay curious and fully open to the experience, to try not to desire or want, to remember the impermanence of all things, to learn about yourself, to be aware,” she reminds me, restating the intentions I shared with her yesterday during our “preparation session.”

“Start to feel your fingers and your toes, maybe your spine, as you come into the body.”

“And slowly open your eyes again whenever you are ready.” 

She uses a golden, metal stick to sound the also-golden singing bowl - it’s time to begin, finally. With shaky, self-conscious hands I swallow the pills. 

-—--—--—--—--—-

The first and, I feel, most appropriate question that arises is: “What did I just put in my body?” I know it could be one of 3 randomly assigned options: 1) 17.5 mg of oral psilocin, 2) 4.36 mg of sublingual psilocin, or 3) 25 mg of oral psilocybin. Psilocybin, the naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in some mushrooms, is broken down by the body into another substance called psilocin, which turns out to be the active ingredient responsible for the hallucinogenic effects of those special, little fungi. So, theoretically, the effects and experience should be very similar, if not the same, between the three options; the main unknowable is the dosage - is this about to be a blanket of unstoppably intense waves of experience, or a chill hang out with two still-strangers? Since there’s no way to know, it’s not worth considering further. My two companions on what Amy loves calling “my journey” also don’t know which substance+dose combo I just consumed. I know they’ve done this before, and that comforts me but also invites questions of how their experience of watching me during extremely vulnerable moments might compare to the vulnerable moments of other “healthy adults” that have participated in this trial. I hesitate, still in my head. 

“I invite you to go inward,” says Amy, with gentle insistence.

I know what that means. It means “get to work.” I take a sigh and nod and grab the black headphones and black eyeshades from their respective nightstands. The sofa-bed looks layable so I lay in it, the soft covers still underneath me, my head on a pillow, right knee propped up against the sofa part of the bed, left out straight on the bed. I put the eyeshades and headphones on, and music that seems to have been scientifically formulated to optimize psychedelic experiences enters through the delicate holes in my ears and pours itself into me. I smile. 

My shirt feels sticky on me; I try to breathe deeply and slowly. I’m progressively getting warmer, as if the music has filled me all the way up and now has nowhere to go, as if the headphones are burning from the pressure of inescapability, as if my face-flesh and lips are flushed from within, as if - a hand gently appears on my shoulder. I take off my headphones and eyeshade without thinking and sit up. It’s BPMOW time, which means it’s already been 15 minutes since the last blood pressure reading. Every time the handcuff squeezes my arm, I seem to find a different pleasure in it - this time it’s how I can feel the blood drain from my hand, my fingers, and the tips of my nails with a strange clarity. The music continues from the speakers. 

“And what’s your intensity level right now?” (I have to report this every time the trusty BPMOW is whipped out to squeeze the shit out of my arm, for science)

“Maybe a 2 or a 3.” It was just “about a half point” fifteen minutes ago. 

“You don’t have to get up and take the eyeshades and the headphones off next time if you don’t want to. We encourage you to go inward and stay inward.” 

“Right, that makes sense,” I say stupidly. 

In the moment of stepping back inward (eyeshades and headphones strapped to my noggin) I feel only slightly embarrassed but mostly normal; the very next moment is of a different nature entirely. What has been pouring into me begins to seep out of my pores. In the black, endless emptiness completing my field of view, vertical lines radiate to either side of the central point of visual perception, multiplying outward at an increasing rate until they suddenly curve and warp and change themselves into free-flowing optical illusions of overlapping, converging, and connected loops, valleys, and shapes. Color bleeds into view, somehow, and paints in the moving shapes with dim, varied hues. I wonder how I’ll ever be able to describe it - and I blink and the next moment it’s all gone and I see only the void of the eyeshades. There I go, clinging again. Whenever I become aware of something instead of experiencing it, it’s gone; it all begins to feel impossible to pin down, the present too vivid for words. With the emptiness in view, the music overwhelms me and I sink into this body. 

I cling to many things (physical objects, ideas, other people, social incentives, etc), but what I most cling to is, of course, the self: the endless and illusory feeling of living inside of the head, of being the director of experience itself, the unique combination of time, genetics, and environment that I exist as. It seems I need to do this in some form or another all of the time, lest I forget who it is that’s supposed to survive, live, reproduce, and die. This type of clinging is so easy and straightforward that it doesn’t feel like clinging at all. Yet it does produce a strain over time because it ultimately acts as a way to separate myself from the rest of experience, to make myself the subject and the rest of the world a set of objects to navigate through, when what is more true is that the external is much more a part of me than at first seems obvious. Subjects act on objects; objects are acted upon by subjects. The self says, “all of this is happening to me,” but it’s slightly more accurate to say “I am what is happening.” But still, “I” am something - there is still a subject here. Subjects experience via an idea. The self is not real in the same way my body is because it has no physical manifestation and exists only as a mental construction. This is not to say that mental constructions aren’t “real,” just that they filter and bias and judge experience. It is only a bit strange that this way of being is normal, that I limit my reach and reality to something so abstract and vague as an idea. But how else could it be? Am I to believe that I am not a subject, that I don’t create my own experience, that the world around me is somehow a part of me too? 

Slippery ground here. It’s easy to misunderstand the implications of not being a self, to go down a path of existential crises, and to get stuck in a misty, helpless confusion. The subject/object dynamic of experience as a self can, at this point of misunderstanding and confusion, become more intense and visceral than before, creating an even more definite and thick divide between the subject and the objects that surround me, further detaching me from the rest of reality, intensifying the self-consciousness. The subject is trying to see itself, to understand why it feels like a self in the first place. But in the mirror the subject can only see itself, an uncontrollable growth of self-awareness. What the subject wants is to see but recognize nothing, to find the objects as part of the subject, to actually break down the contrived divide of the self and the world. The subject is close to it, but not close enough. The objects are still something recognized, still have categories, still mean something, still relate to the rest of the objects and the subject, still feel distant and detached. 

Riding along with the self, I cling almost equally as hard to the present and the future, which are in the end manifestations of the self in different forms. The past is a reconstruction, a retelling of a story, a puppet hand directing behavior, a way to make sense of the flow of experience; the future is a construction, a fantasy, still a story but more open-ended, and relies on the past self as a basic building block for its creation. I seem to need these selves for different reasons, and I cling to them as if they were my flesh and blood. 

Going backwards now. Why do I need the past self and what does it give me? In its most basic form, the past self is a story made up of flashes of experience. Some flashes are stronger than others, but most of what has happened to me is gone in the dark, mysterious void of memory, and the rest of it - the flashes - are not bright enough to fully illuminate the internal landscape within, forcing me to fill in perceptual gaps with what comes to me first out of a biological need for efficiency; a flimsy but helpful construct built on impressions. And so when I look back at the past I am not transporting myself to the real moments that happened but rather am recreating a version of reality in my own image, folding new experiences into the greater narrative of my self and my life, filtering and coloring and distorting what I have already experienced to 1) distill the most important pieces of information from my past to inform behavior in the present and future, 2) maintain a sense of continuity of selfhood so that I can continue to act in ways that (hopefully) benefit me, and 3) project out towards the unknown from a baseline of personal beliefs, truths, and convictions that have grown out of the narrative I construct for myself. The past self is helpful, and perhaps necessary, to function as a human being; without it, the present would be a sea of confusion as I try to make sense of the changes in experience. It would likely be unpleasant to awake every morning not knowing who I am, to act blindly and without consideration of consequences, and to have to relearn each day the social norms needed to exist with others. It makes sense to cling to some things. 

(It’s not lost on me that within these pages the past self is a constant presence, a necessity to retell events, thoughts, and experiences. All of this talk about clinging and the past may sound hypocritical coming from the sort of person who clings so hard to the past that he writes a whole goddamn story about his experiences, not to mention the egotistical nature that is inextricable from a self-facing narrative. Even as I tell myself to not cling to the past self, I am making the past self even more solid and prominent in my mind. At the same time, this sort of proves my point - the past self is so ingrained in me that there is no way to escape it. The internal paradoxes are endless.)

Even if it is necessary and sometimes useful, there are dangers that lurk in the shadowy depths of the past self. The sum of all life experiences and lessons builds itself over time, layer after layer after layer, emerging from the past into the present. I am, in the end, all that has happened to me. It usually feels like my beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, like everything else that I consider to be part of my supposedly unique constitution, are things that I chose or built for myself, but they are more truthfully natural consequences of the mysterious forces of genetics and environment that have directed life for billions of years. Regardless of whether or not I choose to be who I am, the fact remains that I am. This is where the danger lurks: in the identification of my past as defining my present, in the unseen influence of what is no longer true, in the remnants of experience that actively shape the world. The past self, with its ideas and beliefs and convictions formed from past experiences, traps me in its patterns. It tells me “this is who I am.” This happens over time, as I accumulate more and more experiences and the channels of the mind deepen into habit and automation; over time, my ideas about my own life become fixed, entrenched, stagnant, impossible to penetrate, and as a consequence I become stubborn, closed off to change, and incapable of imagining different versions of myself. I am trapped as who I am when I cling to the past self. Even when I try to look forward, I am actually looking at a version of the past self; I am seeing the present and the future through the eyes of the past. 

Going forward now. What is the future self and why do I cling to it? As far as I can tell ( which is admittedly not a whole lot), the future self is a mechanism for action. It embodies my hopes, expectations, goals, and desired states to - hopefully - encourage useful behavior in the present. Without it, I may find it difficult to put into context the actions of the present, to care about whatever it is I am striving for, to see the path towards something different. A life without a future may be spent equally well in abject hedonism and mindless pleasure as complete and utter apathy. Clearly useful for more than just personal achievement and making things hard on myself for no reason, this feature of the conscious human brain, the future self, must be a significant evolutionary advantage for our species because we can project future states for entire groups of fellow future selves. Like the other selves (past, present), the future self is an important and necessary psychological phenomena for continued survival. 

What the future self is not, however, is real; the alternate versions of my life that I create, projected from the present and informed by the past, are pure fantasy, the work of the human gift of imagination. As can tend to happen, the gift of imagination has a downside: I can become overwhelmed by strong emotions that appear when I consider the potential for the future. Fear, of course, for what may one day happen; hope, naturally, for things which may never come to pass; anxiety, obviously, for the ways in which things may go wrong; apathy, at times, for the bleakness and meaninglessness of some distant, untouchable realm; excitement, sadly, for the treasures that can only be found outside of the present. From the endless possibilities of the blank slate of tomorrow, I can become paralyzed. The freedom of the future is at once both an opportunity and a dilemma. But even if by the grace of luck I know what it is I want so clearly as to remove all other possibilities, the fearsome cling still appears. Once I cling to a future that is, again, not real, the weight of expectation falls upon me, blinding me to the limitless possibilities that appear at the dawn of every moment and mistakenly solidifying the unreal as truth, as what should happen. The reality that unfolds tends to differ from what I believe should occur quite frequently. Disappointment is inevitable with the cling. A further danger lurks: when I cling to the future self my life begins to slip away almost imperceptibly, the reality of the present siphoned into the unreality of an imagined alternative; I become only what I will be later instead of being what I am now. In other words, the future self is constantly looking to exchange the present for some moment that’s not here yet. And so all of this makes the future self uncontainable, uncontrollable, and, above all, a personal mythology. 

Move back just a little. All of this past self and future self and clinging happens, as does everything that ever happens, in the present. Questions of reality are still hazy in the present, but what can be said is that the present is more “real” than the past and the future. For that and other reasons, I cling to the present firmly - for good reason. Without being able to experience the present, I would not be able to survive, let alone thrive or make anything useful out of myself (not that usefulness is the highest virtue). Beauty, awe, love, and bliss, along with sadness, anger, disgust, and fear can only be felt in the present; all of what it means to be human is accessible only right now. Even when I cling to the past and future selves, I am in the present, even if it doesn’t feel like it. 

The quality of the present - how deeply and richly it can be felt - varies wildly within and across brains. Some who are trained and truly disciplined (or perhaps lucky and predisposed to it) can exist in the richness of the present with little cling. Moments float by, undisturbed and unimposed upon; nothing needs to be different than what it is; acceptance is not needed because it exists prior to perception. Or so I’ve heard. The majority of my waking consciousness, which normally feels more desperate and unconfident, is not quite so graceful. Whether the cling manifests as an attempt to stop or slow the natural flow of experience in a naive hope for stasis or as a misplaced dissatisfaction with the flow itself, the result is the same: the present is lost in the confusion of a mind which is turned inward. The self, being a self and therefore also a subject, sees the present as an object - an idea - and by doing so reduces it to such a horrifyingly finite and contrived caricature of itself that it no longer is recognizable as the expansive, truthful entity it once could have been. And suddenly the moment is gone, in the past - and there goes the next one too. 

The cling is a manifestation of my aversion to change. I must be able to see change clearly to let go of the cling, to experience the unfolding naturally and without judgment. I look to the past and to the future for stability, but can’t find it. The self is trying to persist in some uniform way amongst all of this change. Thats why its so painful for me to see it clearly, because it reveals how non-uniform I really am, how I am changing just as much as everything else, all of the time, and how, like everything else too, I will change into not-me one day, will die, will undergo one final transformation before the emptiness floods it all.

All of this appears quite suddenly in the form of immediate and obvious self-knowledge. The words only come after and even then still lack the texture of intuition, the unexplainable self wisdom. 

Time moves differently here in the “Dosing Room,” but it’s unclear if it’s slower or faster than usual - somehow it could be both. What is abundantly clear is that moments do not stand still, but instead flow without remorse, judgment, or hesitation into the past, seen only as a dream of another the very instant they pass by; within each moment there is more than is possible to comprehend or be aware of as the little gray pills seem to have inflamed the insides of my skull towards unknown territory. It is impossible to cling to anything here. As I try, the futility becomes clear, and there is nothing left to do but relinquish control, to be choiceless, to not want or need or question, to experience the unfolding, and to be aware of the complexity and metamorphosis of the present. It feels good to have no choice, no say, no control - the illusion that persists despite overwhelming evidence against it (free will, having control, etc) disintegrates. Instead of fighting against the world with my beaten, hopeless, and feeble pinch of self-determination, I welcome the overwhelming nature of experience knowing full well there is nothing I can do now. 

Physical sensations within and without appear and disappear, only a few of which remain clear enough to remember: the outside of me gets chipped away until it is only a network of delicate scaffolding; bubbling, hot lava slowly pours out of the tops of my legs, erupting from the kneecaps; the blanket now on top of me feels as though it weighs more than the inside of a black hole, pressing me down and squishing me into the sofa-bed until everything below my neck feels like a flat expanse of warmth; every square inch of me is being pricked by benevolent needles; a surging violin note attaches itself to my head and tries to escape the rest of me, stretching out my swollen skull into the darkness; a vibration appears slowly then all at once - I’m oscillating in a high pitch as if my being is just one large cymbal; I’m sweaty and then cold and then sweaty and then cold. The music, the body, the things seen and not seen, and the thoughts all seem to converge into one funnel of experience, inseparable and interconnected. There is texture everywhere, not only in my body but also in my mind and the music pouring over me. “Awe” is not enough word for what this is, and neither is “euphoria,” nor “inspiring.” What this feels like is true, overwhelming, inescapable intensity. Yet this is exactly what I wanted because, above all else, it feels like being alive. There is no emotional, cognitive, or intellectual experience in these moments (which feel like one long moment) besides that strange mix of awe and euphoria - it is purely physical. I can’t help but smile through it all, Amy and Jordan no doubt taking notes on the wideness, length, and intensity of each helpless grin. 

“What are you feeling right now?”

 “I…I…it’s…” I hesitate and stumble. “I can’t explain it,” I say through an awkward laugh. “What’s it like for you right now?”

“Us? Why are you asking that? This is about you.” 

“I guess I can’t help it. So, what is it like?”

A long silence.

“It feels cozy and safe. I invite you to go back inward,” says Amy, somewhat patiently. 

“Ok.” And I sink back in, helpless and free. 

Predictably, it’s BPMOW time again, and I welcome its presence to anchor me back to reality. This time though it feels like my humerus is about to explode from the pressure, blood pools above the tight, blue cuff and warms my upper arm while my forearm and hand sit empty and cold below, and I can feel my pulse quicken and louden and merge with the music. Even having no formal training and in an especially compromised state, I can still tell that the numbers appearing on the BPMOW’s monitor are especially high. I try not to let it bother me, successfully. Instead, now that my eyes are uncovered once again, I stare in wonder and amazement at the blurry, overexposed, cliche print of the Oak tree that now looks like a living, breathing painting of intensely vivid color. The spikey, oakey leaves are dancing and seem to be projected from a futuristic 3D IMAX theater; the grass at the base of the tree is also swaying, but more importantly it is radiating copies of itself to either side of what used to be a patternless space an hour ago (or 3 hours ago? Or 30 minutes ago?). Amy and Jordan seem to be farther away. I can barely stand to look at them but can make out that their cheeks and mouths look flushed with purple blood. “And what’s your intensity level right now?” one of them asks. The snowy trees behind me are moving up and down and side to side like the cascading cards at the end of a Windows Solitaire game. “8 and a half, maybe 9.” The brown, carpeted floor covering the room is breathing into strange shapes. 

After a slightly precarious trip to the bathroom just down the hall (trust me, it’s not worth going into), I’m back on the sofa-bed. It seems that the peak is over, but there is still plenty more to come. My lower back, which is a problem area for me after a delivery truck opened its door into the bike lane last September, feels tender from laying down, so I decide to sit in a meditation pose while being strapped into the mental spaceship that is the eyeshades and headphones combo. I notice my right wrist first, and I bring my left index finger and thumb around the bones connecting my forearm to my hand. They feel delicate in my also delicate fingers, an excitement enters my body and a big grin appears on my face. I make my way up my own arm, squeezing the forearm gently but also firmly enough for it to reveal its new-found nuances. I’m reminded of the bones in it, the warmth of the blood coursing through it, the relative firmness when I contract it, the pleasant squishiness when it’s relaxed. The elbow is full of joy. With all of my fingers touching the pointy protrusion with delight, I bend and straighten and bend and straighten my arm using this wondrous little hinge joint, feeling the skin tighten around the muscles, bone, fat, and blood vessels at the highest point of bend, marveling at the loose, dangly skin when it’s fully extended. The left hand keeps moving up towards my admittedly puny bicep and tricep - this area seems mostly boneless until I remember what the BPMOW did to my other half earlier. I feel good, really good. This reminder that I have a body - that it’s made of skin and bone and blood and muscle and fat - brings with it an immense wave of gratitude, an oft ignored acknowledgement that having a body at all is a privilege, even with all of its changes, its imperfections, and its fragility. The possibilities of having a body flood my thoughts all at once. How ungrateful and blind I have been becomes clear, a sadness passes across me like the temporary darkness of a sole, high flying cloud during a blue day, and I take a moment to mourn the experiences I have missed out on or made less by my own oblivion. I will become a better observer. 

Peak intensity is in the past - I report “a 5, maybe” after the latest BPMOW reading (which also shows a drop in my heart rate, thankfully). It’s only 1:30 PM, but also it’s 1:30 PM?! I lay back down, but things are different again. The edges of the music are less sharp and well defined, there are no mystical patterns in view, and my body feels more normal than not (just taking up a higher percentage of my attention now, which persists over the following days and weeks and months). After noticing this change, I briefly try with shameless naivety to return to how things were just a few hours ago, thinking that maybe it’s a matter of concentration and awareness alone, forgetting that I had distinguished company inside of me. This is the clinging again: the desire for things to be slightly different versions of what they are, the slight disquiet of the mind that hovers over me, the self-awareness that tears apart the present like a spoiled child, the desperate hope and longing for the past. I am back to paying attention to the fact that I’m paying attention instead of paying attention; I am observing myself observing myself, again, rather than experiencing what is there to be experienced. All is now mediated through a layer of sticky, egotistical film, like I’m watching a movie. Questions emerge: How to remain an active participant in the unfolding of experience while avoiding “the cling”? How to direct a life in a world of endless change and limited to no control? How to remove the layer of film that prevents the inner and outer world from merging into one expanse? How to break the tension of knowing I am not a self but only being able to know that as a self? What is the relationship between action and observation? Can I become overly passive if I view myself only as an observer? Is acceptance an action? What is it that I have learned here and why does it matter?

I keep coming back to the body. Last week, when discussing my intentions for participating in this clinical trial with Amy, I had communicated a desire to go beyond intellectualization and into the physical realm of emotions; I want to not just know that I am feeling something or should feel something, but rather to actually feel it in my body. No part of the emotional scale is exempt from this desire. Emotions, from my admittedly layman understanding, are physical because they exist to direct action - happiness: do more of this and/or a reward for action; anxiety: be aware of potential danger and don’t die stupidly; anger: do not let yourself or your tribe be slighted or disrespected; sadness: negative reinforcement/do not do that again; inspiration: take action and do something now; disgust: do not put that inside your body and/or walk away. Our emotions direct us through our bodies. Yet, I feel sadly deficient in this universal experience of emotion (to further explain: imagine the full, average range of human emotional experiences is a normal distribution (i.e. a bell curve with either side extended to the edges of the graph). My distribution seems to be squished towards the center point, the arms on either side tucked in, leaving less emotional range not because I’ve missed out on experiences that would elicit those emotions but because experiences that should elicit those emotions somehow fall short). I understand emotions cognitively, but, in the past, I could barely feel them within me. To feel them, to be alive, is what I want - even the negative emotions, when they arise. It seems that a prerequisite to feeling emotions is to feel your physical body, to be aware of the entity doing the experiencing. Today, in the “Dosing Room,” I seem to be on the verge of something important, of the discovery of my own body and its range of sensation. This is the baseline. 

Once most of the psychedelic effects have subsided, they ask me to  “play some iPad games,” otherwise known as psychological assessments. I had almost forgotten that what is happening here is research. The first “game” is a series of 10 lists of 10 words each, every word being displayed for 3 seconds. Tomorrow, they will test how many I can remember (bed, American, physician, oven, gorgeous, etc). Next, I am asked to rate the emotional affect of a series of images on a scale of “very negative” to “very positive.” This ends up being quite silly - the images are half “ two of the most boring-looking white men in the world, wearing all black, in various stages of bro-ing out together” and half “random assortments of paper clips, erasers, pencils, and other inanimate objects in different orientations,” the juxtaposition of which makes each successive image more ridiculous and hilarious than the one before. It’s unclear how I’m supposed to feel about some of these - do paper clips have an emotional valence to them that I have been unaware of my whole life? If I drag the slider towards  “very unpleasant” when there’s two men hugging, will the Emotion Police come barging into the room with assault rifles and batons and pepper spray to put me away? I take a strange pleasure in the activity, sitting, squatting, leaning, laying, and standing in the “stretching area” (a white towel placed in the back end of the room right behind Amy and Jordan), noticing how my body feels in each new position. 

Hours stretch towards the end of the day and it feels like I’ve been in this little room for much longer than 9 hours. I crave sunlight and fresh air to pacify my wrung out mind. Despite laying down for most of the day, I feel a deep tissue exhaustion; my body and mind are a single husk, I can barely think or do. My good friend, Cuffy - the personification I’ve assigned to the blue cuff attached to the BPMOW that is used to crush my arm - is back on me for one final reading: 124/58, the lowest blood pressure of the day so far (concerning? maybe). My two protectors lead me through the basement, up the elevator to the first floor of the UCSF Nancy Pritzker Building, and release me to the rest of the day. I get back to my foggy slice of paradise and exist for long enough to fall asleep, not sure what to make of what just happened to me.

This is the first chapter of "On Trial." To read the whole story, please follow this link to download the PDF or this link to download a Kindle file.