Set against the stark beauty of the Sonoran Desert, this book is the confessional chronicle of a thrill-seeking journalist whose life is detonated by a single inhalation of toad venom. Drawn into an underground circle devoted to the secretion of the Sonoran Desert Toad, he expects another wild trip in a long history of psychedelic adventures. Instead he is blasted, within seconds, into a blinding ocean of white light where there are no visions, no stories and no “him” at all—only an immense, wordless presence that feels more real than the world he left behind.

Repeated encounters with 5-MeO-DMT tear down his old identity and push him to rebuild his worldview from the ground up. The narrative tracks this transformation in vivid detail: desert ceremonies by starlight, ecstatic ego deaths, terrifying dissolutions, and the long, messy work of integrating nondual insight into ordinary life. Along the way, the book reconstructs the modern history of 5-MeO-DMT, explores the emerging mythology of the toad as a living sacrament, and raids Eastern mysticism, Western esotericism and cutting-edge physics metaphors in an effort to make sense of what has been revealed. At once raw and visionary, it is the story of a “tryptamine palace” built not of stone but of consciousness itself—and of what happens when the doors are blown off their hinges.