Summary

"Travelogue, Trip 2: Psilocybin." Pollan’s second experience with psychedelics takes place in the apartment / studio of a woman named Mary – a former Catholic who loved sacrament, and who realized that the church would never allow her to participate in its rituals because she was female. She had studied the practice of mushroom hunting with Paul Stametz, and seemed at first to be a little too bizarre for Pollan’s tastes, but who eventually gave him the impression that he could trust her completely. They do their preparatory work; Mary feeds Pollan the largest psilocybin mushroom he has ever seen; and he starts his trip.

The first phase of that trip is defined, Pollan says, by the kind of music Mary plays: through a digitized urban landscape emerging from the computerized music in the background. The world’s general darkness and intensity ease...