Dinah Bazer

Dinah Bazer is a New York woman in her sixties, a figure-skating instructor and ovarian cancer patient whose psilocybin session at New York University brought her face to face with the fear that had persisted after chemotherapy. Her account matters because its two most striking elements resist an easy choice between psychological change and spiritual experience: she said the fear of recurrence had receded, while the feeling she described as divine love left her atheism intact.

Identity and Circumstances

Bazer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2010. Although she completed a successful course of chemotherapy, the end of treatment did not end her distress. She remained preoccupied by the possibility that the cancer would return, and described her days as shaped by waiting for that possibility. The treatment had addressed the disease; it had not, by itself, relieved her fear of it.

The book introduces Bazer as a participant in cancer research at New York University and as a person whose experience complicates assumptions about spirituality. She identified as an atheist before the session and continued to do so afterward. That continuity is important: her account does not present a conversion or a new doctrinal belief, but an intense experience whose emotional and spiritual language exceeded the categories she otherwise used to describe herself.

The Session and Its Turning Point

Bazer worked with Tony Bossis. At the difficult beginning of her session, she imagined herself trapped in the hold of a ship, rocking and overcome by fear. She reached out from beneath a blanket and told Bossis she was frightened. He held her hand and encouraged her to continue with the experience; she later described his hand as an anchor. The scene places a concrete act of support beside the disorienting image: she was not asked to deny the fear, but to stay with it while another person remained present.

As the session developed, Bazer experienced the fear as something she could locate and confront. In her account, it appeared beneath the left side of her ribs, separate from the tumor, as a dark presence in her body. The distinction mattered to her: the cancer was not something she could control, but the fear was no longer simply identical with the cancer or beyond her response. Anger rose in the session, and she directed it at the fear, insisting that it would not consume her. She reported that the fear then disappeared.

Bazer later said that this fear had not returned in the years following the session. Her account does not claim that the cancer itself was brought under her control; she explicitly distinguished the illness from her changed relation to fear. The outcome she described was narrower and more personal: she could face the fact that the cancer remained outside her command without treating her terror as equally inevitable.

Love, Atheism, and Spiritual Language

After confronting her fear, Bazer’s experience shifted toward what she described as overwhelming love, with her thoughts turning to her children. She remained, by her own account, a committed atheist, yet found that the language of being immersed in God’s love best conveyed what had happened. The book preserves the tension rather than resolving it by declaring that she had secretly acquired religious faith. For Bazer, the experience of love and the absence of belief coexisted.

That paradox initially troubled Michael Pollan, who had interviewed her. After his own journeys, he reconsidered how an atheist could describe such an experience without changing her convictions. His interpretation was that the love felt powerful precisely because it seemed to come from no identifiable person or worldly source; he understood the experience as a kind of unearned grace, with God serving as a word large enough to express its magnitude. This is Pollan’s reading of Bazer’s account, not evidence that Bazer adopted a theological explanation. Her own position remained that the phrase conveyed an experience for which ordinary language was inadequate.

Meaning and Narrative Significance

Bazer’s story gives the book a concrete example of spiritual language being used without a corresponding religious conversion. The distinction also matters to the book’s account of psychedelic meaning: a person may describe an experience as sacred or overwhelming without deciding that it proves the existence of God. Bazer’s testimony makes the language of spirituality available as a description of felt significance, not only as a declaration of faith.

The episode also links that significance to the practical circumstance of serious illness. The account does not suggest that the session cured Bazer’s cancer or made its outcome controllable. Instead, it describes a shift in how she related to the fear accompanying the possibility of recurrence, followed by a powerful feeling of love connected to her children. In the book’s wider argument, such experiences can give meaning and consequence to a world that may otherwise seem arbitrary, including for people who do not believe in God. Bazer’s lasting importance in that argument lies in the coexistence she embodied: fear could recede without the disease becoming controllable, and an experience could feel divine without displacing atheism.