dressed like a girl. She dyed her hair red and wore rings on all her fingers. Ulla Ladegaard taught me how to step into a fairy tale and seek out someone wicked to slay later on. This could also be an evil beast or an impersonal force. Anyone could do this exercise or therapy. We went through Grimmâs fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersenâs fairy tales and obscure Croatian, Italian and German fairy tales that Ulla had collected. I chopped the heads off trolls, off death, off the devil, off black dogs. They all symbolised my depression.
I really liked Ulla but no matter how many dragons I slew it didnât make my depression go away or even grow any less.
The last time I saw Ulla she had called in her sister, who was a fortune teller, a clairvoyant. She pored over my palm and then burst into tears.
Ulla apologised, but there was no need. You didnât need a fortune teller to know that things would not go well for me.
Ulla from Birkerod taught me how to give my depression faces. Faces, adventures, quests. Depression was not just an impersonal grey rot engulfing me; it had evil-looking avatars beckoning me into their universe.
I invented long tales in which I was lured into dark forests. Deep in the forest, in the dark, a huge hound would be lying in wait, or a troll or a lion. This creature was the depression. If I vanquished the monster either by force or by cunning the depression would disappear.
The tales filled my life when I was in High School. On the outside I was a normal student. No one suspected the orgies of violence and bloodshed raging within me. Not until I graduated from High School and started dental school did my depression stop having different faces; the faces merged into one face and only one face.
As soon as the face emerged I immediately called Ulla to thank her. Without her help, the face would never have come to light.
She laughed when I told her. âDan, you have no idea how happy that makes me. It was bound to happen.â
âWhy was it bound to happen?â
âBecause you try so hard. You expend more strength than you have. But remember, my dear, life is and will always be a quest. Weâre all of us a little lost out there in the dark woods, youâre not the only one. Weâre all seeking the love that moves the sun and the stars.â
âWhat does that mean?â
âOh, youâll find out some day. When you do, think of me, Dan.â
The road that led to all the different monstrous faces merging into just one face went past a professor at the School of Dentistry.
Professor Ib Schroder, Dr. Odont, was my teacher of pharmacology and corrective jaw surgery during my fourth year. He was an ugly little man with a pockmarked face that made him look like a frog. He had been tortured during the war and for many years had been an alcoholic and a manic depressive. When I met him he hadnât touched a drop for several years and was no longer manic depressive; he was only depressive. He knew I was depressive too because we had often been patients together in the psychiatric ward at Rigshospitalet. We had spent hours and days together in the corridor comparing notes on our depression.
As a pharmacologist at the School of Dentistry he had access to all kinds of drugs and pills. He had a friend, a fellow professor, who was experimenting with LSD as a treatment for depression. Schroder invited me to join them.
The session took place at his friendâs apartment on Strandboulevarden, the same building Georg Brandes used to live in. There was a plaque on the wall commemorating it. By chance the building was only a stoneâs throw from Nordisk Kollegium, the residence hall I was living in.
On a Wednesday evening at the end of November 1966, six of us lay down on mats in the professorâs living room. He gave us each a thin piece of paper on which he had placed a small dose of LSD. We were instructed to keep the paper under our tongue until it