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DMT: tance with. DEATH AND DYING + 223 I think I've learned what it's like to die, to be completely helpless in the throes ofsomething. That's been helpful. Eli, whom we met in chapter 12, wrote to us after his first high dose of Stunned, Ifelt myself holding back. I relaxed and the environment began to change noticeably. I knew I was going through thefirst bardo of death, that I had been here many times before, and it was okay. "This is just like the last time," / thought. Enough continuity with my waking consciousness gave me this thought next: "But this is myfirst time cross- ing over." I concluded I had broken out of time and space and either was experiencing my "normal" pattern ofdying or was connected to a time in the future when, once again, I will know "this is the time Iwas in, back then, now." Some months later, in another study, Eli said, / no longer fear death. It's like you're there one minute and then you're somewhere else, and that'sjust how it is. So think it had that effect. These experiments are helping me in my reading of the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.*/ know what it's like to be totallyfree. Joseph, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian-Native American businessman, also noted how deathlike the DMT experience was: / think the high dose is like a death trauma. It knocks you out ofyour body. I could have tolerated death or some major physical leaping-out-of- this-plane type of experience under DMT. This would be a good drug for people in a hospice program or the terminally ill to have some acquain- Unlike these other research subjects, death and near-death themes domi- nated in Willow's and Carlos's high-dose journeys with the spirit mol- ecule. Let's now turn to their stories. Willow was thirty-nine years old when she joined the DMT project. She was married and lived in a semirural part of the county. She was a medical social worker who treated drug-abusing professionals. She saw