Soon after I set out to write a book about psychedelics, it became obvious what I would have to do: Trip, and then write about what it was like. True, I could have relied on the testimony of others, but that seemed less than satisfying. Ever since the 11-year-old me read George Plimpton’s account of playing football in “Paper Lion” (1966), I’ve believed that the most absorbing way to convey an experience is to have it yourself and then try to describe it from the inside. Best of all is to have it yourself for the first time, which is the only time the comprehensive wonder of any experience is available to us.

But while it may have been obvious that I would have to trip in order to write “How to Change Your Mind,” it wasn’t at all obvious how I would write about that experience, one often described as, well, indescribable. William James famously wrote that mystical experience — perhaps the closest analogue we have of a psychedelic trip — is “ineffable”: beyond the reach of language. I couldn’t count on a common frame of reference, since not all of my readers would be familiar with the exotic psychic terrain onto which I wanted to take them. Boring readers was another worry. Perhaps the second closest analogue of a psychedelic journey is the dream, and there is no surer way to drive people off — even your loved ones! — than to tell them your dreams. I’d also read enough “trip reports” online and in books to be acutely aware of the literary risks — what Arthur Koestler, a skeptic after his own psychedelic experiments, described as “pressure-cooker mysticism” and “cosmic schmaltz.”

As I began to write my book, the accounts of my trips loomed up ahead like a range of tall, possibly insurmountable peaks. And matters only got worse when I began having the trips I intended to recount, a series of guided psychedelic journeys on a variety of different chemicals, including LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca and a substance called 5-MeO-DMT. This last one, which is ingested by smoking the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, was, I’d been told by a friend, “the Everest of psychedelics,” a trip she promised would obliterate not only all sense of self (as many psychedelics can do) but also all reference points of time and space. How do you possibly construct a narrative without the essential ingredients of person, time and place? What’s left?

Taking notes during my journeys proved futile. I couldn’t summon the will, and the very effort seemed like a violation of my guides’ first commandment, which was to surrender to the experience. So instead I asked them to write down anything I might say. This yielded a handful of mostly useless notes, consisting of vague superlatives like “Spectacular!” or gnomic utterances like “I don’t want to be so stingy with my feelings.” The evening after each journey I spent several hours transcribing everything I could remember, which on psychedelics is a lot. I produced 10 to 15 single-spaced pages in which I tried to render the images, sensations, insights, events and appearances (of people and places) as literally as I could, resisting the urge to interpret, comment, assess or otherwise shape.

When it came time to write the travelogue section of the book, I reread those files with a sinking feeling. Here was a detailed transcript of a stream of consciousness, but a hopelessly anarchic one liable to reverse course without notice, splash wildly, overflow its banks and then simply vanish, circling down a gyre of nothingness. I wasn’t sure I could make sense of its contents, let alone someone less invested in the workings of my mind. I did find some striking images in my notes — being trapped head-to-toe in a black steel cage, watching a vine snake its way up the bars to reach the sun and realizing “a plant can’t be caged” — but what in the world did these images mean, if anything? And some of the profundities I’d recorded in the immediate aftermath of the experience — such as the supreme importance of love, an epiphany I’d had on LSD — now seemed embarrassingly thin, platitudes best suited to a Hallmark card. I was reminded of an experience Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. had on ether, in which he discovered, and managed to write down, “the one great truth which underlies all human experience.” His notes, which he’d struggled to jot down in his drugged state, read: “A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout.”

Now, there are two ways to regard such an observation. The first is obvious, at least to our sober selves: as risible proof of the emptiness of chemically mediated “insight.” O.K., fair enough. But might it be worth our while at least to try to imagine a mental state in which the smell of turpentine actually explains something? A state in which all our metaphysical ideas simply dissolve in the presence of overpowering sensory experience? That, it seems to me, is something for which the smell of turpentine is a decent metaphor.

What I realized, reading over my own dubious epiphanies, is that there is an inside and an outside to a psychedelic experience, and that one way to write about it would be to honor both perspectives more or less simultaneously. I wouldn’t take sides, in other words, but would instead attempt to cultivate a measure of intellectual generosity, a kind of negative capability, toward my mental doings, however bizarre, and at the same time frankly acknowledge the reader’s skepticism, which in fact I shared. I would be of two minds. (This is a little like the memoirist, who recounts the naïveté of her younger self from the more knowing perspective of the grown-up author. But here it is not time but type of consciousness that separates the two voices.)

So when I got to my LSD epiphany about the supreme importance of love, following a series of encounters with my wife and son in which I was overwhelmed with gratitude for their existence, I paused in the narrative to reflect on the problem at hand, dilating on the delicate line between profundity and banality. I confessed to the reader that the nakedness of the emotions I was describing, undefended against the pitiless glare of irony, made them embarrassing to write about. Irony was certainly an option, à la Koestler’s cosmic schmaltz. But while irony might have protected me from ridicule, it wouldn’t have been faithful to what I had felt and experienced — which had the power of a revealed truth.

