‘I saw dead bodies, rotting and smelling in the heat. I realized that they had not been collected because there were mines planted all around, and I was walking through them.

‘The military found out that I was involved in secret anti-regime propaganda, and sent me to the war front. One night a rocket dropped on us. The shrapnel chopped the head off a running boy, but he kept on running without his head.

‘I was setting fire to a shop as a political protest, but the petrol got on my shoes and I caught fire as well. They arrested us and gave us 75 lashes with a hard rubber radiator tube. They took us prisoners to a big public prayer by a mullah, where I saw my father. I stood up and started challenging the mullah. They beat us and took us to a bigger prison where the in-charge molested the younger prisoners, and insects from the rubbish crawled over us all the time. They made us watch as they hanged our friends. As I was leaving after my year-long sentence, a guy at the prison entrance happened to see me and sent me back for one more year.

‘This girl and I were stopped and searched while driving with anti-regime leaflets. I was arrested again and given a death sentence.’

Hussein shares with me the stories of his rough childhood in Iran, fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, being imprisoned and sentenced to death for his anti-regime activities, and his harrowing odyssey to flee Iran through four countries with fake documents.

‘I have narcolepsy. Sometimes in sleep paralaysis, I hallucinate that my visual world is split. The left side is reality, and the right side is a bad dream, and I am sliding towards it.

‘I met this blind woman who at some point started hallucinating technicolor light, then started seeing her hand as she waved it across her face, then other objects. I ran experiments, and her brain images looked similar to those of a sighted person looking at the same objects.’

Dr Jesse Breedlove studies mental imagery and hallucinations. We first talk about her own narcolepsy and sleep paralysis experiences. Then she describes her experiments on a blind lady with non-optic sight, the blindsight on ibogaine phenomenon from the previous episode, and her theory for what’s going on here. Then we talk about stretching the definition of ‘vision’, the pushback in the scientific community against such phenomena, and about neurodivergence.

‘The traditional ibogaine ceremony of eating the ground root bark is a rite of passage for all males in the Bwiti tribe. They use it as an oracle. We have adapted it as a treatment for the diseases of the western developed world, like PTSD, trauma and depression. When an 18 year-old enlists in the military and conducts sanctioned violence for 20 years, they sometimes can’t get out and live a normal life without these psychedelic interventions.

‘On ibogaine, the participant often perceives that they can see through their closed eyelids and the eyeshade. I see them starting to peek through the eyeshade, and wave their hands in front of them to verify, and there’s disbelief at first. It can feel like a superpower, but also terrifying, because you can no longer hide from your visions. You can also see beings you know, or humanoid creatures. The ibogaine can also take on a voice and an entity that can be in dialogue and answer questions. And you can experience a life review, like a projected home movie, with your life memories and trauma.

‘I myself experienced being able to see the room through closed eyes and eyeshades, then I saw a six-foot-tall humanoid with a goat head. I could walk around and look away and look back, and it was exactly where and how it should be in 3D. These beings will often tend to you for the entire visionary experience.

‘The ibogaine asked me if I wanted to know how I would die. I am a death doula and comfortable around my own death. I said no, because I don’t want it to take away the surprise. It said, good answer, and moved on.’

Colm Walker is a veteran and the executive director of The Mission Within psychedelic retreat, where the patients we are studying at our Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy (at the University of Texas at Austin) go for their ibogaine and psilocybin treatment. He shares his background and a description of their program, and what a typical ibogaine experience is like. Then we talk about a strange phenomenon that is allegedly common on ibogaine: being able to see through closed eyes and an eye mask, and we discuss the prospect of seriously scientifically studying it.