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162. * THE SESSIONS what it was about at one level, the inner emotional contact just wasn't there. His "free-floating" anxiety was anything but nameless. His life was in tur- moil and simply making that interpretation helped him to start a process. The emotional power of DMT then drew it to some resolution. Stan's joking about taking his last dose of DMT for me, rather than for himself, pointed out an interesting conflict: We needed data, but we were also concerned with the volunteers' own needs. If Stan were having a clearly traumatic experience and seemed to be decompensating, we would have called off the study. But he seemed willing, on his own part, to con- tinue, and we never seriously thought about stopping early. Nevertheless, his comment did have a ring of truth about it. The visual images volunteers encountered on DMT sometimes reminded them of dreams. And, as Freud said, dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious." Looking at, thinking about, and discussing dreams may help us understand hidden emotions known only by the distressing symp- toms they cause during ordinary wakefulness. Let's imagine that someone develops paralysis in his right hand, and multiple medical examinations reveal no physical problem. He's sent to a psychiatrist, who asks him to remember his dreams. That night our theo- retical patient dreams of beating up his boss at work. The psychiatrist suggests that his paralyzed hand represents deep anger at the boss, rage that he didn't know he had. Maybe these are emotions he's afraid to feel because he doesn't know what might happen if he did so. A light goes on in the patient's mind, and he regains function of his hand! While such an example smacks of a Saturday morning cartoon pro- gram, it captures the essential process by which dreamwork can be personally helpful. Symptoms are not often as obvious as paralysis; they commonly include anxiety, depression, or relationship problems. The approach we took to supervising DMT sessions was as clinically neutral as possible, but ignoring psychological issues emerging from vol- unteers' experiences would have been negligent. Sometimes I had to decide quickly whether or not to take up the personal psychological thread a research subject had begun, whether to push that volunteer forward just