[This is part two in a three-part series on a very special molecule: DMT. Find part one here.]
You open your eyes as if for the first time, holding the vapor in your lungs, traveling without moving through a tunnel of geometric patterns. This is acute acceleration, the rising vibration that ripples through the body as you approach another world: the realm of N,N dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
Your guide begins counting you down, but none of your life experiences could have prepared you for this blastoff. Her sounds and words take serpentine, synesthesiac form as everything rattles and hums, pieces of your brain’s model of consensus reality dropping off around you. Suddenly, everything is illuminated, like someone throwing the lights on in a grand theater. The vivid scenes of “reality,” it turns out, were merely a scrim, hiding actors and props for the big reveal: that all your waking world’s a stage, its people merely players.
You emerge in a room that’s not a room lit by sources from outside the electromagnetic spectrum and colored by hues that don’t exist in this dimension. There are textures: smooth surfaces, hyper-defined edges, and polished sheen; indescribable, self-powered objects slowly rotating in silence. You’re greeted by millions of energies and entities, consciousness beyond beings that communicates through telepathic speech. It’s the most real thing you’ve ever experienced, both completely foreign and eerily familiar.
You’ve reached the “breakthrough” state, which is no small feat. Getting there requires three big, rapid, sustained gulps of smoke or vapor (or an injection) of DMT. While substances like beer or mushrooms alter consciousness in degrees, DMT is more like an on/off switch: You’re in, or you’re out. And when you’re in, the boundaries of our three-dimensional experience not only soften, but completely dissolve—at least, according to the largest study to date of DMT experiences, where researchers analyzed nearly 3,305 online trip reports over a decade-long period.
Nearly everyone in the study (94%) encountered sentient, autonomous entities experienced as “beyond”—mostly benevolent, often female, ranging from deities and spiritual figures to extraterrestrials, fairies, machine elves, and amorphous light-beings—in a space that seemed to be another dimension or reality (reported by 88%). In three-quarters of encounters, the beings communicated with users, often imparting messages of profound importance: an extremely emotional experience for almost all (92%), shifting not only long-held beliefs, but their very conceptions of reality.
Yet DMT works not by adding something new, but amplifying what’s already within you. This molecule and its analog, 5-MeO-DMT, are the only psychedelics believed to be endogenously produced by the human body: They’re found in trace amounts in our brains and bodily fluids, just like they appear in a vast array of animals, plants, fungi, and trees. They’re also the only psychedelics that transport users to what truly seems to be a freestanding world: ineffable, and incomprehensible, but remarkably consistent.
Scientists at Imperial College London call it a “world-analogue” experience, likening it to an incredibly complex simulation. It’s a “waking dream,” they say, where the tripper is navigating an internal landscape unchecked by exterior information. Indeed, neuroimaging reveals brain-wave patterns similar to those of deep sleep, but with the kind of unpredictability that comes from being actively engaged. Yet dreams, however bizarre, still occur within the framework of the third dimension, as noted by neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore. How could your brain simulate a dimension it’s never encountered before?
Remember, what you experience as reality is pretty much all in your head: Your brain merely samples sensory data from the external environment to build and modulate your internal model of the consensus world, matching it to intrinsic information. Such model-building activities are linked to serotonin—a neuromodulator excreted by the brain that, among many other functions, restricts and controls brain-wave patterns. When psychedelic tryptamines like psilocybin or LSD interact with serotonin receptors, the model is disrupted, replacing predictable patterns with a kind of controlled chaos that allows new neural pathways to be formed.
DMT also interacts with serotonin receptors, but the effects couldn’t be more different. Rather than becoming less predictable, brain-wave patterns become regular and reliable in the presence of DMT, just like they do in the presence of serotonin—only users are experiencing an entirely different reality. Instead of disrupting the model, writes Gallimore, it’s as if the brain switches over to a different model altogether. But where did it get the information to build that model in the first place? If our brains have the ability to generate a given reality now, we—or our ancestors—must have been there before, in some sense. No wonder users say the entities seem to have been waiting for them.
Sure, it’s possible that it’s all an elaborate hallucination—but this isn’t the way we understand brains to work, Gallimore says. As trippy as it sounds, “we must consider that the DMT worlds built by the brain are modulated by extrinsic data from outside the brain”; in other words, the molecule may permit access to an alternate reality. But he adds that this doesn’t necessarily mean another physical place. Perhaps DMT opens the door to part of the collective unconscious, like psychologist Carl Jung described; maybe it’s another dimension, ever-present and layered on top of this one, if we only gain the ability to see it. Indeed, scholar J.V. Wallace posits it’s the waking world that’s the hallucination, a “tightly regulated psychedelic experience” that DMT simply cuts loose.
Who’s to say which world is “real,” anyway? We still don’t understand how consciousness even works, much less altered states. That’s what makes these neuroscientists so excited. “Psychedelic” means “mind-manifesting,” and as a psychedelic our bodies appear to produce, DMT, they say, could help us understand the mind. There’s evidence that DMT is directly involved with central nervous system functions governing sensory perception, and its immersive scenes could shed light on the biomechanisms of visual processing; we may even discover an “endo-DMT” system like the endocannabinoid system. DMT is potentially responsible for dreams, hallucinations, imagination, and even creative and scientific breakthroughs, states that astrophysicist Bruce Damer calls “endo-tripping,” or “tripping from within”—and that’s not only how our brains work, it’s what the whole human experience is about.
DMT is believed to flood your brain during the fetal state, then rapidly drop after birth, spiking naturally at just one other time in your life: when you die. That’s how it can feel when you’re climbing the cosmic escalator; a DMT trip shares many features with near-death experiences. But it’s less like something catastrophic is happening and more of a nagging sense that you’re missing something, someone is expecting you somewhere, and there is so much left to do.
It becomes clear that none of this exists where you’re going, no people or appointments or plans, and while this can be freeing, it also kind of breaks your heart. Even if all the world’s a stage, we’ve come to love this performance, these actors in our favorite roles. The show might go on, but it still hurts to watch that curtain fall, and when you stumble from the other realm raw and bewildered, you just might need to cry.
Yet if DMT is death’s dress rehearsal, its analogue takes you further still. The N,N variety may be the Spirit Molecule, but 5-MeO-DMT is the God Molecule. To learn more, read part three of this series next month.
Disclaimer: Psychedelics are not for everyone. There are serious and potentially fatal risks for people taking certain medications, such as antidepressants, or with certain mental health conditions; always consult with your care providers before journeying. For those who do, proper set, setting, guidance, and integration are absolutely crucial.
