Nicholas Powers, author, teacher, and psychedelic activist, discusses the future of psychedelic therapy, his release from PTSD, and his vampire political novel, Thirst: The Rich are Vampires.Read the interview below, or if you prefer to watch the interviews, please subscribe to my new YouTube channel!Thanks for splashing in Charlotte Dune's Lagoon! Subscribe for free to receive new posts about mind expansion, hot topics, psychedelics, ethical quandaries, and self-experiments, or share this episode with a friend.The following transcription is auto-generated and lightly edited. Interview Transcription: Charlotte: Welcome to Charlotte Dunes Lagoon, where we talk about whatever we want.Nick: I love swimming in the lagoon. I feel like the creature from the Lagoon, so thank you yay! Charlotte: I'm going to let you introduce yourself because I'm sure you can describe your bio better than I can, but I'll just say that you're the author of Thirst, Nicholas Powers. This is an amazing book with incredible writing, a crazy story, and stunning illustrations. I was very impressed.Professional DaydreamerNick: Thank you! My name is Nick Powers. I'm a professional Daydreamer, and that's my side gig. The way I keep the lights on and food on the table and to make sure child protective services don't take my kid away for starving is I'm a professor of literature at a State University, Old Westbury, which is in Long Island. I live in Brooklyn, and I take the train out to Long Island and teach.The teaching is going very well. I've been doing it for about 16-17 years, and so I think I've got it down to a well-oiled machine, but the students always change, and so the way that you teach changes. This semester, we're doing Caribbean literature. We just finished Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague in London during 1665. Now, we're doing Albert Camus Le Pest, which in English is The Plague.In my other class, they’re getting ready to write their senior thesis, which is a 25-page critical essay. So, that's my professor gig. On the side, I advocate for psychedelic therapy. I give a lot of talks, and some of them are paid, and some of them are not. It's more of a passion project, and the goal with that is hopefully to get the Department of Mental Health in New York City and hopefully the surrounding Tri-State areas to follow like a domino effect offering mental health psychedelic therapy as an advanced mental health technique to working-class people and poor people who really need it.Because oftentimes, they face intergenerational trauma, life in the streets, and I think they could benefit from this new high-tech medical technology. Lastly, I'm a father, and I would say probably the most powerful psychedelic I've ever taken is my son. I love him; he brings me incredible amounts of joy and grief all at the same time, sometimes within the space of one minute.Charlotte: How old is your son? Nick: He's four. Charlotte: Oh, wow, that is a joy and terror all at the same time. I have a 15-year-old, so I'm a little ahead of you.My daughter has Asperger, well what they used to call Asperger's or high-functioning autism, so it's a very different experience, I think, for me. But it's a beautiful time. All the times are beautiful, but I like that she and I can have intellectual conversations. We watched Romeo and Juliet, the Baz Luhrmann version, the other night, and her takes on it were so hilarious because they're reading Romeo and Juliet in school, and she was like, "This is giving call the police; this is giving underage date rape; this is like…and on and on” And I’m like, I did not know these words when I was your age, and I'm so glad that this generation exists. I have a lot of hope in Gen Z. People will knock on them, but I'm like, these guys are smart. Yes they're addicted to their phones, but aren't we all at this point? You must have a really interesting perspective teaching young people and seeing firsthand how technology is changing everything, and especially reading about the plague. That must feel really timely. Nick: I taught the literature of the plague in 2021, and you know, that was kind of like at the climax and we were starting to kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccines starting to roll out. It became a form of book therapy because the plot reflects or parallels their real life, and so the emotions that the characters feel are emotions that the reader has felt. By expressing what the character is feeling, the reader can then ride along and some of their anxieties can get expressed out through the characters. Some of the depths that they've had to witness and endure - the near-life fatalities, the paranoia about the quarantine, the insecurity about the future that kind of just went up in smoke - all of these emotions are reflected in the text. So, the book, in a sense, allows them to express themselves through reading the book. They actually massage stuck emotions out through their ...
