Patrick Mettes’s psilocybin therapy experience was an all-day session in an NYU cancer-patient trial, but it unfolded as more than a clinical procedure: amid preparation, music, and attentive guides, he confronted cancer and mortality while experiencing rebirth, universal love, and a renewed commitment to remain with his wife, Lisa. The session did not change the course of his illness; in the weeks afterward, however, he described a changed relationship to fear, daily life, and the time he had left.

Trial Setting and Preparation

In January 2011, Patrick traveled alone by subway from Brooklyn to a treatment room in the NYU dental school. Lisa had an important meeting that morning. The setting reflected the trial’s uncertain institutional position: the dental college made space for the research while Bellevue and NYU’s cancer center kept their distance from a study involving psychedelics. Patrick’s intention was to cope better with the anxiety and depression surrounding his cancer and to work on what he called his regret in life. He placed photographs of himself and Lisa on their wedding day, along with a picture of their dog, Arlo, around the room.

The session followed a defined therapeutic structure. After three or four preparatory conversations, Patrick was to receive two dosing sessions: one with a high dose of niacin, used as an active placebo because it produces a tingling sensation, and one with a twenty-five-milligram psilocybin capsule. At the start of each session, neither Patrick nor the guides would know which pill he had received for at least thirty minutes. On this morning, at nine o’clock, Tony Bossis and Krystallia Kalliontzi reviewed the plan with him and presented the pill in a chalice. Patrick then lay on a couch with eyeshades and headphones, listening to a playlist that ranged from Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, and Ravi Shankar to classical and New Age music. Bossis and Kalliontzi stayed with him throughout, speaking little but remaining available if he needed help.

The guides’ preparation drew on a wider practice rather than improvisation alone. Patrick received flight instructions written by Bill Richards, and Bossis urged him to move toward frightening material instead of avoiding it. The trial’s preparatory sessions, agreed plan, quiet supervision, music, and post-session account all gave the experience a structure in which it could be approached and later interpreted. Patrick’s own account became central evidence of how that structure met the unpredictable course of the journey.

Rebirth and Universal Love

Patrick described the beginning as a difficult launch that eventually gave way to weightlessness. One of his early encounters was with Ruth, his brother’s wife, who had died of cancer more than twenty years earlier. He experienced her as a guide and associated the passage with feminine energy. Michelle Obama also appeared. Patrick connected this surrounding maternal presence with the feeling that a mother could not fail to love her child; the episode became, in his account, a comforting rebirth.

The guides’ notes and Patrick’s account describe different aspects of the same moment. Patrick was crying and breathing heavily; he reached for Kalliontzi’s hand and moved as though delivering a baby. He later said he had given birth, though he did not know to what. The scene’s physical intensity was followed by a sense of clarity and amazement. He asked for a break when the experience became too much. Sitting up with Bossis and Kalliontzi, he reflected that if everyone could have such an experience, people might be less able to harm one another and wars might become impossible. The room, the guides, and even the possibility of germs struck him as beautiful. Though reluctant to return to the journey, he eventually put on the eyeshades and headphones again.

After that pause, love became the experience’s organizing idea. Patrick described it as coming from a point of light and extending through the universe; the music seemed to condense into a single note, which he connected with everything that existed. Alongside this sense of unity came an insight about simplicity. He applied it to politics, food, architecture, clothing, and television news, his own field: in each, he felt, unnecessary elaboration could obscure what mattered. The episode did not leave him with a program for changing those fields; it gave him a principle by which to reconsider them, with love as the essential concern.

The Threshold of Death

The experience also brought Patrick to what he called a brief death. He approached a sharp, pointed stainless-steel form and reached an apparent edge overlooking an infinite expanse. He was hesitant, but not frightened, and understood that going farther might mean leaving his body permanently. He told his guides that he was not ready to leave Lisa and believed there was more for him to do in this life. The decision placed his relationship with his wife directly inside the experience’s encounter with mortality: the image of an afterlife did not erase his attachment to the life he shared with her.

The session ended around three in the afternoon, with a quick return to ordinary time and space and a headache. When Lisa arrived, she saw that Patrick looked exhausted and sweaty, yet was eager to tell her what he could. He had returned from an experience he struggled to put into words, and told her that he had touched the face of God. The contrast between his visible fatigue and his urgency to communicate marked the passage back from the session to their shared life.

Aftermath and Meaning

A few weeks later, Patrick discussed the journey with Bossis as a possible window onto an afterlife or a form of existence beyond the physical body. He spoke of an infinite plane of love. In later conversations, he described his body and cancer as a kind of illusion. These were his interpretations of the experience, not evidence that the illness had disappeared or that the trial had altered its medical course.

The follow-up also documented changes in how Patrick lived with his circumstances. He meditated regularly, felt more able to remain in the present, and said that he loved Lisa even more. Two months after the session, while he was slowly dying of cancer, Bossis recorded that Patrick felt happier than at any other point in his life. His account thus connects the intensity of the session to a sustained, if not curative, aftermath: fear and illness remained part of his life, while his attention and sense of relationship had shifted.

The experience also sits within a broader history of psychedelic practice described in the book. Guides relied on accumulated protocols for preparation, safety, and integration, and the trial translated some of that knowledge into a supervised clinical setting. Patrick’s session shows how such a container could hold an event that was at once personal and difficult to narrate: a meeting with a dead relative, an image of rebirth, a vision of love, and a choice at the imagined edge of death. Its significance lies not in a claim that these images were objectively true, but in the consequences Patrick reported afterward—greater presence, deeper love for Lisa, and a sense of happiness that persisted as his cancer advanced.