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11 PROLOGUE *+ / smoked it last year. It was a lonelyfeeling leaving there. I thought I had gotten really sick. [felt you hovering over me, like I was dying, and you all were trying to resuscitate me. I hoped everything was all right. I was just trying to catch what was happening inside. He paused, then concluded, I'm tired. I'd like to nap, but I'm not really sleepy. Nils had little to say beyond this, other than that he was ravenously hungry, wisely having skipped breakfast. He ate heartily while filling out our rating scale. So even Nils thought 0.6 mg/kg was "too much"! I spent a few minutes in the nurses' lounge, reflecting upon what we had just seen. From a cardiac point of view, Nils's blood pressure and heart rate had risen only moderately, although we missed the readings at their presumed peak. Thus, there seemed likely to be no physical harm from administering 0.6 mg/kg IV DMT. However, I was not sure if the thinness of Nils's report was because he could not remember what had happened, or because of his style of keeping to himself most of what had taken place. We clearly had broken through the "psychedelic threshold." The sud- denness and intensity of onset, the irrefutable nature of the experience, the inhabited sense Nils described, all added up to a "full" DMT trip. But was it too far beyond the psychedelic barrier? Nils was a self-acknowledged "hard head," requiring higher doses than many to attain comparable levels of altered perceptions from the same drug. How would Philip fare? Philip and I walked down the Research Center's brightly lit hall. We passed Nils at the nurses’ station, looking for more food. He felt great. It was reassuring to see how well he looked so quickly after his harrowing jump off the psychic cliff. I asked Philip, "Are you sure you want the same dose?" "Yes." There was absolutely no hesitation. I was not so sure. If Philip declined undergoing an experience similar to Nils's, my anxi- ety would have become more tolerable. Perhaps he would settle for 0.5 or 0.4 mg/kg. This would be easy enough to do—I could simply stop short of