MIDNIGHT WATER: A Psychedelic Memoir

Join me on a psychedelic journey through medical institutions and meditation halls, cow farms and crematoriums.

Excerpted from Midnight Water by Katherine MacLean, PhD. Copyright © 2023

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Chapter 1: One Missing

My heart pounded as I walked through the whipping wind across the street to the hospital. I knew at a rational level that it was my sister who was dying, but at a deeper level, it felt like I was going to die too. I remembered this feeling from my Zen retreat, and from so many psychedelic trips. The Katherine who walks into that room will not be the same Katherine who walks out. And I also wondered about the woman I was about to encounter. My sister, Rebecca. But also, a woman who had suddenly remembered she needed Tibetan death instructions. Maybe also a deity. I was so inexperienced; I had just been stumbling along, looking for answers, hoping for some relief from the endless parade of death anxiety and psychotic fantasies. How could I help her get through this final threshold? Could it really be as easy as they said? Maybe there was nothing any of us needed to do. Just be with her. Bear witness. Trust that something greater, and more mysterious, was coming.

Chapter 2: Mushroom Night in Freedom

The farmhouse was perched at the top of a long, steep, dirt driveway flanked by huge hay fields and an ancient burial plot. The house appeared elegant and dignified at first glance, with its all-white exterior typical of old New England. On the inside, it was old and spooky and had many levels and tiny rooms tucked at the end of narrow hallways and creaky steps and old furniture, including a grand piano and warped mirrors, of course. It would be a real shocker if there weren’t at least eight ghosts permanently residing there. I definitely wouldn’t have stayed the second night if not for my friend’s presence. Which brings me to one of the only important pieces of advice I can offer regarding healthy psychedelic use: Choose your companions wisely. Make sure there’s at least one real adult in the room and it’s not you. This adult should be the kind of person who is willing to call an ambulance or put a warm blanket over you or simply break the rules of the game by speaking in the middle of the ceremony to ask if you’re ok, because you definitely do not seem ok at all.

Chapter 3: Open Wide and Say Awe

How is Baltimore like a high-dose psychedelic? What exactly transpired in that tiny fake living room in the middle of a war zone? How does a person get trapped in a vortex thinking they are living their best life while actually being devoured by God? These are the questions I am left with all these years later, since walking away from my former life. I have often reflected on the riddle of my time at Hopkins, as a psychedelic researcher, before it was a popular or well-paid job to have. Before psychedelic researchers were respected or taken seriously. When it was just a handful of crazy people trying to do the impossible, which was study psychoactive drugs that were actually good for you.

Chapter 4: Womb with a View

We enter an alternate universe that only vaguely resembles Patrick’s apartment. One memory is the clearest: I am laying on my back, nearly on top of the altar, with my knees spread wide open and one foot braced against the frame of the door. I hear Patrick in the kitchen, but he is actually an elderly female, a midwife preparing a bowl of hot water and folding clean, white sheets to receive a newborn baby. Eileen is my doula-sister, kneeling next to my body as I go through the contractions and expansions of childbirth. There is no pain, only the great joy and power of creation. I close my eyes and see a vast space opening up before me. My inhales and exhales feel minutes apart. I see how easy it would be to die, to simply follow my final exhale out into that great expanse of welcoming darkness. During the long pause at the bottom of my out-breath, I realize that when the breath simply flows out at the right time, death is not violent or painful. I hear Eileen crying, and think, “This is what it’s like to be surrounded by grieving family members on your deathbed. Why can’t they see there is nothing to cry about?” I choose to take the next inhale and open my eyes, and I know that a child is being born. Birth and death; “same, same,” as the Nepali sherpas used to say.

Chapter 5: Happy Happy

I somehow manage to get my daughter out of her vomit-soaked pajamas and dressed in her winter jacket and hat, throw on my boots, and run with her out to the car that is now half-buried in snow. It is freezing cold and she is screaming as I shove her into her carseat. I can barely see through the ice-covered windshield as I navigate the maze-like roads across town to the hospital. We manage to park and get through the door of the ER without another vomiting episode, and of course, by then, Frances is awake and not crying and seems basically fine. The lady at the desk is looking at me quite quizzically, “Can I help you?” I try to explain the seriousness of the situation, how we are from out of town and I’m solo parenting and my daughter is about to die, and instead I just feel like some tweaked-out, homeless lady who’s looking to score a warm bed and some opiates for the night. They take pity on me and give us a private room. After about 45 minutes, once Frances has fallen peacefully asleep on my chest, the doctor comes in to check her out and informs me that a particularly virulent stomach bug called norovirus has been going around and that’s almost certainly what inspired the projectile vomiting. She leaves me with some anti-nausea medication that I remember from my sister’s chemo days, and says, “It’s a slow night. You can can rest here for a bit before you venture home.” I immediately take the meds myself and pass out.

Chapter 6: Mama Bear

I could hardly sleep that night. My mind kept mulling over what happened between the ritual in the woods and the Rice Challenge. I kept replaying the cabin question in my head. I KNEW the teacher had said, “Could you come to my cabin” not “Did you come to my cabin”. He was always so particular about his speech that he wouldn’t have just made a casual mistake like that. But why had he said that? What was going on?? Reality was really starting to warp and bend. I knew something important was happening but I couldn’t figure out what. I thought about my sister, and how she had languished in the hospital for two weeks and then suddenly, on a Saturday night, with panic in her eyes and realizing there was no way out, she made the choice to go all in. And she died in two days. So I said to myself, “OK, Zen Master, I’ve tried it your way. I’ve done the technique and made some progress. But now I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to ask my sister for some divine intervention. I want to show you the kind of rice we make.”

Chapter 7: The Pain is Important

The pain of each contraction obliterated any other thought or intention; all I could do was breathe and endure it. But during the time between contractions, I experienced such total pain relief that I entered a deep, peaceful trance. I’m sure these breaks lasted only a couple minutes or so, but it felt much longer. I focused my gaze on a photo of my sister I had hung right above the birthing tub. She was dressed up for a Hollywood screening party of “The Green Lantern”, and we always referred to it as her Superhero persona. John said it reminded him to be brave, because my sister was always so tough and could seemingly withstand any amount of pain and suffering. Following the birth of her daughter, my sister had confidently declared that childbirth was “easier than running a 400”, which was the race I had specialized in in high school and that we had ran together as State champions in the 4x400 relay. She said, “You can do anything for one minute,” which by that I guess she meant how long she pushed during the final contraction. But this was way harder than a 400. I felt duped. I appealed to her, “Can’t you make the pain stop?”, and she laughed and said, “No. That’s part of it. That’s the deal.” After she said that, I knew the only way to end the pain was by giving birth. “In and through”, as one of my mentors used to say about psychedelic trips.

Chapter 8: Immunity

When I hear my dad’s words echoing in my mind -- “I’m not God” -- I also think of a woman who once shared about her ayahuasca experience at one of my integration circles in the city. She had a thick accent and it was hard for her to describe in English what the experience had been like. She mostly focused on the pain and confusion, how it seemed like the whole thing was a waste of time. No visions, no insights, no divine plant spirits. And then she woke up the next morning and, in her exact words, “My memory cracked. Everything started flooding in. And I realized that I had been on an altar fighting with God.” I’ve never heard a closer description of what Life has felt like for me. I had been fighting with the God that I was taught, through Catholic school and church and my upbringing: God the Father. The one who was kind of an asshole and seemed to enjoy inflicting punishments and being right all the time; the one who was willing to sacrifice his own child and leave him bleeding on a cross just to prove a point. And in my little kid mind, my dad was the closest thing to this terrible God. He seemed all-powerful. I wanted him to take responsibility for everything that had happened, and fix it! But I had forgotten he was also human.

Chapter 9: Forgiveness Garden

While my dad was on his final pilgrimage, I planted my forgiveness garden. I had no idea how hard it was to make something grow. There was the digging and the moving of rocks. The cow poop and the layers of compost. You know that saying that farmers love? “Getting dirt under your fingernails”? Well, I hated getting dirt under my fingernails. It was one of my lifelong phobias. But I managed to dig my hands into that poopy, rocky dirt and plant my first seeds. Teddy Bear sunflowers and zinnias for joy; calendula for healing; cosmos for the Mothership; marigolds for Death; poppies for the heroine’s journey (a nod to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz); and finally, lion snapdragons for anger. As I pushed each seed into the Earth, I planted my grief and rage and feelings of betrayal alongside it. And as I scattered my sister’s sacred ashes over the top layer of soil, I said my prayer: Please, take this shit and turn it into gold.

Chapter 10: Hakuna Matata Tea

Back home at the farm, the first flower in my forgiveness garden bloomed that day: calendula, a super-healer and member of the marigold family. Marigolds, with their pungent aroma, are the flowers that call the dead back to their families on Dia de Muertos. They are also the flowers offered to Ganesha. Oh yeah, Ganesha. Remember that guy? I haven’t said much about him since the first chapter. I guess I forgot to mention how I tried to throw him into a whirlpool in Scotland to end the curse of all the trauma from my sister’s death and Tsering’s drowning in Nepal and everyone’s lung problems. How I took him off my altar and replaced him with a very peaceful white Buddha, hoping I could just cure myself with extreme positivity. But he kept coming back. He can’t help it; he loves hard cases. He knows you can’t just chop someone’s head off and banish them. You can’t stuff your monsters in the closet and tell them never to come out again. You have to heal in relationship, even if your dad is kind of a stubborn jerk. So how could I not pay attention when this magical marigold bloomed on the very day my dad entered hospice? How could I not accept that forgiveness was happening, whether I liked it or not.

Epilogue: My Island

Bermuda is a tiny, fish-hook-shaped island in the middle of nowhere -  nearly a thousand miles from any other land mass - situated at the northwestern edge of the mysterious Sargasso Sea, which is itself a swirling vortex of golden seaweed in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean. Many a myth has been told about sailing vessels and aircraft being lost through that portal, the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Perhaps it is by standing guard at the edge of this vortex for millions of years that Bermuda has developed such resilience and fearlessness. My daughter was the one who pointed out that Bermuda looks more like a mermaid than a fish hook, and my son is enraptured with Bermuda’s origins in the mouth of a volcano. These are the myths we tell in our family. It brings me great pleasure to think of Bermuda as a bad-ass mermaid, born out of a volcano, presiding over an entire ocean. She’s my kind of girl.