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and fit with their experience. Many even prefaced their reports by saying, "This was not a dream," or, "I couldn't have made it up if I wanted to." 200 * THE SESSIONS I was baffled and nonplussed by the sheer volume and bizarre nature of these reports. My crude and minimal responses to volunteers' tales in this chapter clearly reflect my quandary. At first I tried to avoid the pitfalls attendant to developing any explanatory model, either for my benefit or for that of the subjects. After a while, however, we all needed to make sense of these types of sessions. As a clinical research psychiatrist, I entertained the idea that the regularity and consistency of these reports, and the strength of the sense of reality behind them, supported a biological explanation. We were acti- vating certain hard-wired sites in the brain that elicit a display of visions and feelings in the mind. How else could so many people report similar experiences: insect-like, reptilian creatures? I believed that these experiences were hallucinations, albeit rather complicated ones—simply products of brain chemistry brought on by a "hallucinogenic" drug, like a waking dream. Several volunteers' eyeballs did rotate in their sockets during high-dose DMT sessions, reminding me of rapid-eye-movement sleep, when dreaming occurs. Maybe DMT was inducing a wakeful dream state. However, research subjects tenaciously resisted biological explana- tions because such explanations reduced the enormity, consistency, and undeniability of their encounters. How could anyone believe there were chunks of brain tissue that, when activated, flashed encounters with be- ings, experimentation, and reprogramming? Neither did suggesting that it was a waking dream satisfy volunteers' need for a model that made sense At a slightly more abstract level, I tried a psychological explanation. That is, these experiences were symbolic of something else: wishes, fears, or unresolved conflicts. However, these "symbolic" explanations weren't any more successful. Even gently persistent interpretations fell flat. How could these experiences reflect unconscious psychological issues like aggressive or dependent wishes? In some volunteers the need to make sense of the strangest sessions was almost academic: "It was just the drug."