icture this: You’re in a house in suburban Baltimore, tripping on four different drugs, watching grown men and women—including at least one grandmother—cuddle platonically on mattresses. Some are weeping, some are stroking each other’s faces, one is reciting the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” in a voice stunned by grief. There are candles and Buddha statues and a watercooler with crystals in it. Filling every room, blaring from Sonos speakers, is Mariah Carey’s version of “I Want to Know What Love Is.” You want to lie down yourself, preferably on a vacant mattress, but someone tells you to stay out of the sunroom because it’s “very angry.” The drugs you’ve been given have cute names, like secret agents: S and K and Ma, a blend of several “sacraments.” Their true identities are MDMA, DMT, psilocybin, and whatever the active compound is in kanna. Still, you feel good but not transformed. You fill up your water bottle. In the living room, a woman claims that Jesus visited her in the middle of the night and told her to pull up her kitchen floor, under which she discovered blood stains. The stains were from a girl who’d been made into soup and fed to the homeless. There’s a hammock in the backyard. You make a journey to it. You lie there, sipping crystal power. When you look at the tree above your head, the branches all burst into ghostly flowers, a continuous bloom. It’s like the tree is auditioning for a part called TREE. Per instruction, you haven’t eaten since lunchtime. Your stomach is in psychedelic pain. Your guide, a suburban mother who’s confessed to tripping over 500 times, is nowhere to be found.* You lie there, waiting for something bigger to happen. Because all this—the drugs, the group work, presumably the Mariah Carey as well—is supposed to cure you of your crippling fear of death.

Why was I, a father of two young children, tripping in a house with a bunch of strangers? It’s a complicated question. At its root is something that happened to me the summer before. I was 44 at the time: no longer in the prime of youth, but certainly someone who anticipated a good thirty or forty more years of life on earth. My blood pressure is normal. I run regularly. I eat shitloads of kale. Aside from the occasional cheeseburger, I pretty much ascribe to the Mediterranean diet. But last July, climbing the stairs on an otherwise uneventful day of writing, my head exploded. I had heard about “thunderclap headaches,” and it was exactly that: a thunderclap of pain that began in my head and flashed down my neck, as though my spine were a lightning rod, before melting away. The experience fit the name so perfectly that I felt a bit of semantic pleasure.

Now, I get a lot of headaches. Little ones, migraines, the whole gamut. The neck thing worried me—I’d never felt that before—but I wasn’t horrendously concerned. I took a piss and went downstairs, feeling a vague lingering pain. I sat on the couch for a while and then called my wife, who insisted we go to the hospital just to be safe. In the car, my head started to hurt again: no thunderclap this time, but a slow storm rolling in from the horizon. By the time we got to the ER, I was crying. It felt like my head was being laboriously crushed. A nurse sat me in a wheelchair, where I started to howl, clutching my head as if I could maybe tear it off my neck. I threw up all over myself. The doctors seemed alarmed. I was past all pride at this point, bellowing like a madman, pausing only to heave up bile. They tried to give me an MRI, but I puked in the MRI machine and they had to start over. If someone had offered to kill me, I would have given them the thumbs-up. The world and my elaborate, one-of-a-kind past in it had evaporated: I was Present Pain. When the doctor returned with the results—“You’ve had a brain hemorrhage, a significant bleed”—they seemed obvious to me, as if someone had diagnosed me as a man.

Thus began a week in the ICU, the worst of my life. A subarachnoid hemorrhage is like a bruise in your brain—I heard this many times, from a battalion of doctors—and like a bruise, it takes a long time to heal. Even on Dilaudid and oxycodone, surfing in and out of consciousness, I had abominable headaches. I threw up for days, sometimes in front of my children. I had my penis shish-kebabbed by a catheter, which hurts exactly as much as it sounds. I was shaken from the depths of sleep, once an hour, for the same torture test: Where are you? What’s the date? Why are you here? I endured an angiogram without anesthesia—my heart rate was too low—which squirted my head with pyrotechnic bursts of pain. I discovered that walking is a triumph, a subconscious alignment of highly skilled maneuvers that requires a perfectly unbruised brain. Once a day, feeling like I’d stepped off the Pequod after a year at sea, I minced around the ICU with my wife’s help, the nurses cheering at the end of two or three laps, as if I’d won the Olympics. And I was in good shape, relatively speaking. If you ever want to remind yourself that we’re all animals, clinging to our humanity by the thinnest of threads, hang out in the neuroscience ICU of a major hospital. The guy next to me, fresh from brain surgery, couldn’t speak but only moan-bellow over and over again at the top of his lungs, as if calling for the rest of his brain to come home. He sounded uncannily like Chewbacca, when the walls of the trash compactor close in on him.

They never found the source of my bleeding—apparently a good thing—but it added to the sense I had of Death as mad sniper, poised to drop me for no reason. I was in His sights. Even being told by two neurosurgeons that the hemorrhage was a fluke thing, that it would never happen again, failed to assuage my dread. I wondered, perhaps to make my brain-clap seem less random, if my lifelong fear of death had somehow brought it on. It didn’t help things that it took me a couple months to recover, or that for some strange reason I felt compelled to keep it a secret from all but my closest friends. I was too nauseated to eat; I lost over 30 pounds; people stopped me in the halls at work and asked me why my lips were white. The two biggest toes on my left foot stayed numb, as if I’d dipped them in the grave. I worried about dropping dead while taking a dump. I was losing sleep. Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, heart drumming, that poor man’s Wookiee-like howls haunting my head.

I lay there immobilized, trying to hold on to the fact that I was doing this for a reason—that I was supposed to go spelunking in the void and therapeutically return, purged of my fear of death. Then: BOOM.

o when I read about psychedelic therapy for terminal-cancer patients in The New Yorker, in an article by Michael Pollan, I was immediately intrigued. Here were people far worse off than I was, people staring their own deaths in the face, who after a hefty dose of psilocybin seemed to have made their peace with dying. They spoke of venturing into the void and then returning with an ineffable sense of well-being, of touching “the face of God.” The article made it sound like a miracle cure.