The nightmare was spiky, dense, filled with mayhem, but its climactic horror came when the beloved child tripped headlong into the marina water and sank like a boulder, without a shred of buoyancy.

I was paralyzed. The harbor went 100 feet down and he was well on his way to drowning at the bottom. I’m a weak swimmer. The only reason to dive in would be to save face, to have tried, which probably would mean my dying, too.

I woke up. O, that lovely feeling of anxiety fizzing away! I'm awake! Safe! We’re all safe! The day has begun!

For about six months now, I’ve been helping to caretake two households of Afghan refugees — a couple and a family of six. (I won’t name or individualize them, in order to preserve their identities from scrutiny or intrusion.) There are about twenty of us in the helping circle, with a dozen very, very active.

Active means paying rent, teaching English, arranging transportation (my main bailiwick), acquiring food, including halal meats (three food pantries are helping), teaching English, arranging for dental and medical help (one surgery, two tooth problems so far), arranging for driving tests, teaching English, interacting with ICE and other government agencies, providing cars, air conditioners, microwaves, food processors and other tools of daily life, teaching English, arranging for vocational and educational opportunities, and subsidizing each household with a weekly stipend.

At a gathering a couple of years back, a group of about twenty-five was discussing a topic having to do with aging (I don’t recall the exact topic because I’m aging), and the ever-insightful Letty Cottin Pogrebin noted that she was quite concerned about maintaining her relevance in today’s world. I, whose relevance has been far, far more circumscribed than hers, commented that I was less interested in relevance than in legacy.

Ever since, I’ve thought about what I was trying to express.

I was the parent of young teenagers, struggling with how the War on Drugs was interfering with my freedom to parent them, when I wrote “Drugs and Jewish Spirituality: That Was Then, This Is Now” in the May-June 1999 issue of Tikkun magazine. The piece, which identified the powerful role psychedelics had played in the mental lives of several contemporary Jewish notables, was eventually reprinted in Hallucinogens: A Reader, edited by Dr. Charles S. Grob of the UCLA School of Medicine — which led, in 2006, to my interviewing him and four other psychedelic researchers for Jewish Currents magazine.

Among them were Rick Doblin, a Harvard Ph.D. who became the founder and leader of MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), which has been the driving force behind the growing acceptance of experimental psychedelic therapies in the mental health world. Ever since talking with him, I’ve been receiving and reading the MAPS quarterly bulletin — now in its 31st year — and I’m delighted by how much the publication has grown in range and depth from what used to be rather dull reports about small clinical studies to the exploration of major moral, ethical, social-justice, and medical issues.