A doorway that keeps returning

Some experiences leave a single image that keeps returning — a doorway, a figure, a room, an animal, a scene. Not the whole experience, just one picture that holds charge.

You may want to consider writing it down without explaining it. What did it look like, what was around it, what was the light like? Leaving what it means alone for now tends to hold more than deciding quickly.

If you want to stay with it a little longer, some people find it helpful to let the image answer a couple of questions on paper, on its own terms:

• Who are you, as this image?
• What do you want?
• What do you fear?

There is no need to direct the answers. You may want to consider keeping the exchange time-boxed — fifteen minutes with eyes open, writing — and stopping while you still have choice about whether to continue. If an image starts to feel overwhelming, or begins to feel like it is the truth of the experience, you may want to consider setting it aside and returning to ordinary things: rest, warmth, simple food, someone you trust.

That many people find an image helpful does not make it a diagnostic tool. It is a way of holding what happened so it can be looked at. Early evidence on journaling and on working with images after difficult experiences is based on self-report, not on controlled trials specific to psychedelics.

If you want a private place, your notes live on this device and go nowhere else. You can also skip this entirely — a good image, like a good time, is allowed to simply have been there.

The four-lens page in Learn offers three other ways to look at the same experience, if you want them. You can use one, several, or none.