Two first-person accounts of psychedelic therapy from the early 1960s, written by women under pseudonyms, show how female authors navigated access to authoritative discourse in mid-twentieth-century life-writing. Constance Newland's My Self and I and Jane Dunlap's Exploring Inner Space use realistic description to connect readers to their drug experiences while employing metaphor to make familiar worldviews seem strange. By alternating between reader recognition and estrangement, the authors cultivate empathy as a tool for reform, challenging conventional literary and scientific narratives and creating new representational space for altered states of consciousness.
Psychedelic experiences expressed in literature and art provide affective maps that guide readers through imaginal landscapes of sensation and feeling, opening moments of cognitive alterity and inviting alternative ontologies. The essay connects psychedelic aesthetics with affect theory, cognitive science, and systems thinking, drawing on writings from the 1960s and 1970s by Anishinaabeg elder Keewaydinoquay Peschel and health figure Adelle Davis, read through contemporary Indigenous thinkers Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. These psychedelic stories and performances invite readers to imagine new possibilities for navigating life with greater awareness of interconnection within wider ecological and metaphysical systems.