For the longest time I have suffered from depression. A few months back I enrolled in a clinical trial called to see if synthetic Psilocybin could be effective at alleviating the symptoms of depression for people like me who struggle with treatment-resistant depression. Today, I was administered a pill which could have been the synthetic Psilocybin, or a placebo. I think it was the synthetic Psilocybin.

The first thing I want to say is that I am glad I never tried to do anything like this recreationally. The experience I had was not something I believe it would be safe to do outside of a clinical setting.

That said… this is my attempt to explain what I experienced. There are a lot of pieces that I can’t explain well – as I said over and over in the room with Meg (the Therapist who guided me through the experience), you can’t prepare other people for this. You genuinely can’t use rational words to describe an experience that is beyond the scope of rational thought. The experience I had was not frightening, or unpleasant – it was a positive experience overall. I feel like I got to see myself and the world around me from a perspective that I didn’t know existed or was even possible to access.

Anyway… here’s my attempt to capture this experience in words…

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When I was given the pill, I sat on a small bed, and Meg sat in a chair at the foot of the bed. There was a phone playing a soothing soundscape, a small dim orange lamp, and a few LED candles on a nightstand next to the bed.

After twenty minutes, nothing was happening, and I assumed I had received a placebo. Around forty minutes in, Dany came in to take my blood pressure and vitals.

When Dany left, I told Meg that I thought I must have gotten the placebo, because I wasn’t feeling anything at all.

Meg told me to just sit back, try not to evaluate it too much, and just experience it. See what happened. So, I laid back and looked up at the foam-tiled drop ceiling. Then, I noticed that the texture started to appear like it was moving. The movement I experienced was a lot like the movement you see in optical illusions like this:

I said, “Oh, shit’s moving.”

Meg told me to just lay back, and maybe try closing my eyes. When I did, I saw dim repeating patterns of blue and yellow diamonds receeding into a dark background. I’ll try to explain a bit better…

If you close your eyes, and press on your eyes with the heel of your hand you will see blobs of shape and color. Those shapes and colors are not well defined, you can’t really “look” at them – they are clearly just the result of neurons trying to make sense of pressure on your eyeballs. If you could take those amorphous blobs of color and bring them into sharp, reticulated focus – you’d begin to understand what I saw.

I saw cleanly defined blue diamonds, surrounded by yellow and orange lines in a black field receeding into three-dimensional space. On the right and bottom were fields of glossy white. The thing I saw was something like this, only more glossy and brilliantly lit.

Slowly, a haze crept in and the shapes began to lose their brilliance. Then, in a snap, the haze cleared, and I could see these shapes as clearly and brilliantly as if they were a tiled mosaic in front of me. My point of view suddenly sharpened on a few instances of the repeating pattern. The patterns did not feel like a figment of my imagination at this point, they were just an interesting, vibrant optical illusion.

I knew that these patterns weren’t objects that others could see — I knew they were patterns in my own mind’s eye — but at the same time, I experienced them as clearly as the bed that I was sitting on.

Slowly, I became aware of a meters-thick vinyl barrier just above the repeating patterns. I say “I became aware” of the barrier because there was no doubt in my mind that the barrier was there. I didn’t feel like I imagined it – I became aware of it, and I felt a strong desire to experience whatever was on the other side of it.

I felt like the barrier above me was suddenly oriented as a vertical wall in front of me, and then I felt like it was a hallway. If I looked to my left with my eyes closed, I could see down the black hallway tiled with brilliant repeating blue diamonds – and the wall that created that hallway ended right in front of me. Beyond the wall was a vast dark expanse that was cold, and drafty. I wanted to see what was in that expanse.

This whole time I was very cognizant that this was all just in my head. If I opened my eyes, I saw the fake fern in the room, I saw Megan at the foot of the bed, I was not confused or unsure of my surroundings – I just was really interested in these repeating patterns that I saw when I shut my eyes.

I think it was around this point that Dr. Malhotra came into the room, and the experience started becoming more and more vivid. I grew increasingly convinced that thick vinyl barrier I experienced was a veil separating me from another kind of reality. I grew more and more certain that the room I was in was real, and the experience on the other side of the veil was just as real, though intangible.

Around this time, things started getting very strange for me.

I didn’t just want to know what was on the other side of that veil, I wanted to step into it, and experience whatever was over there.

As time went on, these feelings became more saturated and vivid. It felt as if every thought that I had was a thread tied to an infinite number of other threads, and when I evaluated a thought, I would find myself evaluating a million thoughts at once. I couldn’t finish a thought because before I could reach the end of the sentence in my mind it started taking on some other meaning.

I wanted to reflect on these experiences, and remember them so I could report on what I was thinking and feeling. I talked to Megan about that, and she told me not to worry about it – just experience whatever I was experiencing. So, I tried. And I can only say that it felt like I fell through the Universe.

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I thought about describing a brick.

If I want you to imagine a brick, I need to describe it to you. Simply saying “imagine a brick” will get us a lot of the way there. But, maybe you are thinking of a red brick, and I want you to think of a yellow brick. In that case, I need to include more descriptors – now I need to say “Imagine a yellow brick.” The more precisely I want our imagined bricks to match, the more descriptors I need to use. “Imagine a yellow brick with three holes in it that’s three inches high and seven inches wide and weights one pound.” That’s pretty precise. But I can go deeper. I can explain more than just what a brick looks like – I can explain what the brick smells like, what it feels like, hell… what it tastes like I guess. Each set of descriptors enables me to share more intimate details about the brick. But I can go deeper still, I can provide descriptions that go beyond my senses, and you and I will suddenly start thinking about aspects of the brick that wouldn’t usually have been considered. I can explain what it reminds me of. I can tell you an emotion it makes me feel. I can tell you about a song that popped into my head when I saw it… each set of descriptors provides more details about the brick.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is a near infinite set of adjectives that can be used to describe a brick. I could describe how heavy it is, how chalky it is, how much of the brick will flake off under varying amounts of pressure and friction, and on and on and on.

This is when it gets weird…

Then I thought, what if I stopped only thinking in terms of three-dimensional space? What if I don’t restrict my descriptors to terms that other people would understand? Maybe there is another infinite set of descriptors that I have never considered using before. Maybe a brick isn’t just eleven inches long, red, and heavy. If I use descriptors that I’ve never even considered using before, suddenly I have another near infinite set of descriptors available. Maybe a brick can be ten inches happy. Maybe I can experience a brick in synesthetic ways that would never make sense to another person.

Maybe I can have a uniquely transcendent experience of a brick – precisely because I’m not trying to decipher it. If I’m not trying to decode it, pick it apart, and bring the pieces together into a narrative that I can share with another person then I can feel how sanguine that brick smells. I can taste why that brick felt like an electric yesterday and everything tumbles into a pleasantly echoing fractal void of never explored possibilities.

At some point here, I had to pee. I don’t exactly remember – but I remember not being sure if the sensation “I have to pee” was a real sensation. I thought maybe reality was testing me. I was in a logic-loop that was suddenly interrupted by an uncontrollable biological impulse. My thinking went something like this: “What if you try to evaluate something in a way that you have never tried to evaluate anything ever before? What if you try to have an experience that is completely unique from every other experience you have ever had before? What if you tried to throw away all expectations and anticipations, and just witness a thing divorced from any experience you’ve ever had? What if piss I have to piss oh my God what is piss who is piss where is Meg Meg Meg Meg are you real Meg I have to pee can I pee?”

I don’t know how to really describe this other than to say it was like I was watching a video of my experience which was suddenly paused, and played in reverse. At the speed of thought I wound back through all of those thoughts about how to experience a brick without communicating it to other people… I found myself unwinding that version of reality and coming back to this world – but so quickly that this world was still swirling in a blender… and in that ginger-spiced reality slurry, I had to piss.

Meg walked me carefully to the bathroom – which was only a few steps away. Walking to the bathroom, I was unsure if the floor was real. I still wanted to slip past the veil, and go back to examining the logic of that illogical world… but I had to pee. I sat on the toilet (because I didn’t think I could stand), and as I sat there I suddenly felt like the Universe was tearing in half.

I thought that my consciousness was spilling out into a black hole somewhen, and I said out loud “Of course, it’s when I’m on the toilet.” I thought I might have heard some people in the hallway laugh, but it didn’t bother me because I thought they weren’t real anyway. I started to wonder if other people were real at all. What if the concept “others” wasn’t real. What if there is no “other”? What if there is just one thing – what if everything is one thing?

I stood up, washed my hands, and was ushered back into the room.

There, I continued falling through rabbit holes, cascading past the logical consequents and antecedents entailed by questions like: “What if there is no such thing as others?” and “What if meaning itself is meaningless?”

I thought, if there are no others, then there is only one thing. If there is only one thing, and I am here, then I am the only thing. If I am the only thing – then I am everything, then everything is me.” I wondered about the logical implications of this – if that is true, then there is no start – there is no end. There is no such thing as simple or complex. There is no this or that – I started to think that maybe I am just a quantum void experiencing itself. I thought maybe I am nothing but the Universe, self-aware. Maybe I’m a wave particle duality, here and there at once, singular and multiple… composite and indivisible…

I started to think that I was in fact coming out of reality. I felt like I was making my way off this experiential plane and into a new version of reality where logic itself wouldn’t hold on. As I wondered about the implications of such a place, I started thinking Megan was actually a being from that other dimension pulling me out of reality to experience the ultra-noumenal world on the other side of the veil. I laughed and said “You knew Meg! You knew all along!”

The more I thought about that, the more I thought falling out of reality was inevitable. That makes no sense to me now, but it did at the time. I thought everything is inevitable, and it makes me sad because if everything is inevitable then I have no free will, and I can’t make a choice. If I can’t make any choices, then I’m at the whim of time… but what if time isn’t real… what if beginning and ending can swap places? What if the arrow of time doesn’t point just forward? What if the arrow of time can point backward, inside, and around the corner? What if the arrow of time can point to the smell of orange lightning nothing matters what?

I have to lay all of this out here in order – but the order of events laid out here don’t match what happened in my mind. I can remember bits and pieces of my experience when it was at its height:

I remember Garret walking in, and I wondered if him coming into the room was just a test to see if I was willing to let go of reality.

I remember thinking that Meg was trying bring me to the other side of the veil, and I wouldn’t get to the other side until I acknowledged that Meg wasn’t real either.

I thought “Maybe I can only get out of the Matrix if I accept that particulars don’t exist.”

I thought “What if there is nothing but brute fact?”

For a long time I thought I was falling into a logic hole exploring what it would mean if meaning didn’t mean anything…

I felt like every thought slipped on the ground as I thought it and dissolved into the next malformed thought.

I remembered when I was a child and I had a science kit. There was a microscope in it, and instructions detailing how to humanely collect insects to view in the microscope. After I placed an ammonia-soaked paper towel into a jar, I caught a yellow jacket and put it in the jar. The ammonia killed the yellow jacket, and I looked at it under the microscope. Then, I caught a slug and put it in the jar. The slug crawled across the paper towel and instead of leaving a slime trail, it left whatever part of it’s body touched the paper towel. The slug crawled slowly forward and just dissolved into a thin yellow slick. I was traumatized by what a horrible and meaningless death that slug had endured. I threw the jar away and never dissected another bug.

The vision of the slug kept coming to mind – each thought slid through my mind just dissolving into a slick. I have no idea how that made sense to me, but it did. It kept coming to mind, and it made sense every time.

I also kept thinking about fractals. I thought, “What if I am simply a fractal that became self aware?”

I thought about waves – and loops.

I thought that I was wading through time echos and logic loops, exploring the depths of “what if this” and “what if that” until every word I thought was entangled in innumerable threads of connections to everything… nothing felt connected to anything because everything was connected. Nothing made sense because everything made sense which doesn’t make sense… fractals and fractals and echos of patterns of questions and the colors of electric noise…

As I kept thinking through the implications of “what if there are no others” I started to realize that Meg was the only other person in the room. I thought – if there are no others, then she isn’t real. If she isn’t real, then her thoughts are my thoughts… so if I ask her a question and her answer surprises me, then there must be particulars. So I decided to ask Meg some questions, and I didn’t understand her answers.

As this was going on, things slowly started making sense again. Slowly I started feeling more connected to reality, and I stopped feeling trapped in these echos of pulsing fractals… it’s really hard to describe. Regardless, I started coming back to the room, and things started making sense again. Eventually, everything returned to normal, and in within an hour or so of that, I started getting ready to go home.

I could probably write about this experience for hours – but I think I’m going to stop there. I worry that I won’t be able to remember what this experience was like… so I’m writing it down now because I want to have something to look back at. That’s my best attempt to explain what I experienced today – and it doesn’t work. That experience was impossible to describe…

Now, I wait and see if it helps me with this treatment-resistant depression thing that’s been plaguing me for so many years. I feel strangely optimistic about it, and I don’t know why.