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Pain and Fear 247 7 In preparation for writing these chapters on the DMT sessions, I reviewed every page of my bedside notes. It took a month to look over all of them, cutting and pasting people's reports into various groupings of experience. One of these categories was "adverse effects," in which I placed difficult or troublesome responses to DMT. Parts of twenty-five people's sessions landed in this "bin." These adverse effects ranged from being subtle, minor, and extremely brief to those that were terrifying, dangerous, and lingering. Twenty-five out of sixty volunteers seemed like a lot. At the time, I never sensed that nearly half of our volunteers were having problems. Was I minimizing difficulties in my desire to forge ahead in the research under any and all conditions? This number was even more surprising because I hoped to reduce the incidence of frightening reactions to DMT by studying only normal volun- teers with previous psychedelic drug experience. This seemed a safer path than enrolling those who had no idea what to expect, or who were already psychologically troubled.