For my first post I wanted to try and describe what breaking through on DMT is like for someone who has never done DMT (but who might be intrigued about it).
Many things in life can be thrilling and scary; in fact, being scared is an integral part of the thrill. We go bungee jumping, take a ride on a roller coaster or, hell, if we have access to nothing more high tech as kids we might even hold our breath as long as we can. The fun part of a thrill is the danger we expose ourselves to.
I had a breakthrough experience smoking DMT tonight and, as many of you longtimers who are reading this know, relating what you actually feel during those moments pretty much defies description. It is just something so out there, so without parallel in the realm of ordinary life that words alone can't even begin to match the actual experience. How would you explain colors to the blind or music to the deaf? There is no organ dedicated to detecting the shower of signals that make up a DMT (or Salvia!) experience. You only get access to this "organ" during the brief interlude when you've pulled the smoke into your lungs and wait for the whammy that's sure to come.
But for the uninitiated we can approximate the experience by way of metaphors.
Picture the thrill of skydiving. You harness up and walk out to the tarmac. You're psyched and there is a lot of communal energy among your dive mates. You get into the plane and take off and you feel a surge of anxiety and nervousness and excitement all rolled into one. And this surge just keeps on growing until the pilot levels off the climb and gives the signal. You step at the doorway and feel the power of the wind - or more accurately hurricane since you're likely flying at 150mph or more - and you are at the moment of truth.
DMT is sooort of like that. Except you're sitting down (hopefully!) and the excitement and anxiety buildup is scrunched into a mere few seconds while you light up your bowl and inhale. When you set down your bong or other smoking device you are at the moment of truth. There is a gateway and a hurricane awaiting you. You let slip your moorings and.... jump!
Now with parachuting as you leave the plane you are feeling an intense rush during those first few seconds. OH GOD WHATHAVEIDONESHIIIIIT but the scare is a happy, exciting allover tingle that you are enjoying intensely and the remote possibility of the 'chute not opening is the necessary ingredient to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Cut back to the DMT trip: You have set the bong down and you may well say in your head the very same things as the plane jumper. Except you didn't jump out of an ordinary plane but rather a DIMENSIONAL plane. That vehicle you left and are falling away from so fast is the very personification of your sanity. And rather than looking 10,000 feet down to earth where you are to make your landing you are instead staring at the event horizon into a parallel reality that is absolutely ineffable in quality. You have in this moment no words to describe what you are sensing because you have left behind the equipment in charge of creating rational thought and the power of descriptive analysis in an airplane that is now far, far away from your reach.
And you are alone. You are so goddamn alone. Out in this ether falling towards a singularity that is not within your power to relate to. When it is said that you are experiencing ego loss what that means is that you are in a sensory deprivation tank with all brain circuits shut down except for the ones in charge of experiencing visual stimuli and the one responsible for experiencing panic - and both of those circuits are being overloaded! The winds of the dive through the atmosphere are here replaced with primal elements whizzing by at incalculable speed. There are crazy, colorful and disjointed hallucinations that come in sheets, waves, strings and sundry fragments of pseudo-reality of impossible geometries. You hear a psychotic, oscillating hum perhaps with a tinge of sub-audible chatter. Touch, too, is malformed so that if you happen to brush a surface you'll only sense a dirtied texture that shouldn't be. Everything feels wrong. And you, all the meanwhile, are rendered senseless to take any note or appreciation of the experience; much like tossing a just-thawed-out caveman onto Times Square on New Year's eve.
As you approach the ground on your gentle ride back down to your landing site your mind is swirling with euphoria. This is so effin cool man!! WOW, yippeee! God that was scary, can't wait to do it again! On the other hand, the DMT breakthrough exhausts itself slowly and tiny pores of reality - this reality, Terra Firma - open like fleeting portholes. You are not yet capable of thought as such because most of your mind's processors are still offline. Your sight works, sort of, except it's been given a sheen or filter that only relays the vaguest inkling of familiar surroundings. Eons ago this locale resembled somewhere you have been before. Perhaps you sense this much with all the computing power of your average housefly. Familiar surroundings draped in electric veneers of alien-looking symbols; a mocking, cruel and twisted facsimile of somewhere faintly memorable but still distant and incomprehensible.
SLAP! You hit the ground and momentarily bounce off the dirt as the wind catches your parachute and then, like a dying kite, it falls to the ground too. Your trip is over. Your heart though is still racing and your mind is bathed in dopamine and a healthy dose of whatever neurotransmitter is responsible for shit-your-pants scary with the sum effect that you just had a fantastic blast that you'll never forget.
DMT's hold on your psyche is now waning too and the visual filters are slowly easing their grip. You can literally feel more of your brain's various sectors waking up and taking command. You can't talk yet for if you do all that comes out is babbling but that which was faintly familiar is now fully so even if still bedecked with otherworldly auras. If you see, for example, your hand (as I did during my trip) you at some level recognize that thing as perhaps yours but you have no idea how to operate it nor what you would operate it for. And then you regain the ability to move and a few seconds later you can think again in almost-whole sentences even. And you take your first bold steps into speech which is yet undeveloped and sounds to your inner ear like the scratchy voice of a century old grammophone come to life in grandma's attic. Then you can tell your sitter or friends or SO (assuming you didn't go at this solo) what just happened to you but your words are simple and the thoughts not yet fully formed. You keep tuning out while the residual waves of DMT die down and you can compose yourself.
And so on, little by little, you are welcome back to your self. And much as in the case of the skydiver for the next few hours pretty much ALL you can think about is what you went through. And you try to tell those around you, those who never left on this incredible voyage, what it was like. You summon details and all the adjectives within your grasp to explain so that they too can vicariously feel what just happened. But deep down you know your descriptive efforts fail to convey the sense, the rush, the abject terror!
Many things in life can be thrilling and scary; in fact, being scared is an integral part of the thrill. We go bungee jumping, take a ride on a roller coaster or, hell, if we have access to nothing more high tech as kids we might even hold our breath as long as we can. The fun part of a thrill is the danger we expose ourselves to.
I had a breakthrough experience smoking DMT tonight and, as many of you longtimers who are reading this know, relating what you actually feel during those moments pretty much defies description. It is just something so out there, so without parallel in the realm of ordinary life that words alone can't even begin to match the actual experience. How would you explain colors to the blind or music to the deaf? There is no organ dedicated to detecting the shower of signals that make up a DMT (or Salvia!) experience. You only get access to this "organ" during the brief interlude when you've pulled the smoke into your lungs and wait for the whammy that's sure to come.
But for the uninitiated we can approximate the experience by way of metaphors.
Picture the thrill of skydiving. You harness up and walk out to the tarmac. You're psyched and there is a lot of communal energy among your dive mates. You get into the plane and take off and you feel a surge of anxiety and nervousness and excitement all rolled into one. And this surge just keeps on growing until the pilot levels off the climb and gives the signal. You step at the doorway and feel the power of the wind - or more accurately hurricane since you're likely flying at 150mph or more - and you are at the moment of truth.
DMT is sooort of like that. Except you're sitting down (hopefully!) and the excitement and anxiety buildup is scrunched into a mere few seconds while you light up your bowl and inhale. When you set down your bong or other smoking device you are at the moment of truth. There is a gateway and a hurricane awaiting you. You let slip your moorings and.... jump!
Now with parachuting as you leave the plane you are feeling an intense rush during those first few seconds. OH GOD WHATHAVEIDONESHIIIIIT but the scare is a happy, exciting allover tingle that you are enjoying intensely and the remote possibility of the 'chute not opening is the necessary ingredient to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Cut back to the DMT trip: You have set the bong down and you may well say in your head the very same things as the plane jumper. Except you didn't jump out of an ordinary plane but rather a DIMENSIONAL plane. That vehicle you left and are falling away from so fast is the very personification of your sanity. And rather than looking 10,000 feet down to earth where you are to make your landing you are instead staring at the event horizon into a parallel reality that is absolutely ineffable in quality. You have in this moment no words to describe what you are sensing because you have left behind the equipment in charge of creating rational thought and the power of descriptive analysis in an airplane that is now far, far away from your reach.
And you are alone. You are so goddamn alone. Out in this ether falling towards a singularity that is not within your power to relate to. When it is said that you are experiencing ego loss what that means is that you are in a sensory deprivation tank with all brain circuits shut down except for the ones in charge of experiencing visual stimuli and the one responsible for experiencing panic - and both of those circuits are being overloaded! The winds of the dive through the atmosphere are here replaced with primal elements whizzing by at incalculable speed. There are crazy, colorful and disjointed hallucinations that come in sheets, waves, strings and sundry fragments of pseudo-reality of impossible geometries. You hear a psychotic, oscillating hum perhaps with a tinge of sub-audible chatter. Touch, too, is malformed so that if you happen to brush a surface you'll only sense a dirtied texture that shouldn't be. Everything feels wrong. And you, all the meanwhile, are rendered senseless to take any note or appreciation of the experience; much like tossing a just-thawed-out caveman onto Times Square on New Year's eve.
As you approach the ground on your gentle ride back down to your landing site your mind is swirling with euphoria. This is so effin cool man!! WOW, yippeee! God that was scary, can't wait to do it again! On the other hand, the DMT breakthrough exhausts itself slowly and tiny pores of reality - this reality, Terra Firma - open like fleeting portholes. You are not yet capable of thought as such because most of your mind's processors are still offline. Your sight works, sort of, except it's been given a sheen or filter that only relays the vaguest inkling of familiar surroundings. Eons ago this locale resembled somewhere you have been before. Perhaps you sense this much with all the computing power of your average housefly. Familiar surroundings draped in electric veneers of alien-looking symbols; a mocking, cruel and twisted facsimile of somewhere faintly memorable but still distant and incomprehensible.
SLAP! You hit the ground and momentarily bounce off the dirt as the wind catches your parachute and then, like a dying kite, it falls to the ground too. Your trip is over. Your heart though is still racing and your mind is bathed in dopamine and a healthy dose of whatever neurotransmitter is responsible for shit-your-pants scary with the sum effect that you just had a fantastic blast that you'll never forget.
DMT's hold on your psyche is now waning too and the visual filters are slowly easing their grip. You can literally feel more of your brain's various sectors waking up and taking command. You can't talk yet for if you do all that comes out is babbling but that which was faintly familiar is now fully so even if still bedecked with otherworldly auras. If you see, for example, your hand (as I did during my trip) you at some level recognize that thing as perhaps yours but you have no idea how to operate it nor what you would operate it for. And then you regain the ability to move and a few seconds later you can think again in almost-whole sentences even. And you take your first bold steps into speech which is yet undeveloped and sounds to your inner ear like the scratchy voice of a century old grammophone come to life in grandma's attic. Then you can tell your sitter or friends or SO (assuming you didn't go at this solo) what just happened to you but your words are simple and the thoughts not yet fully formed. You keep tuning out while the residual waves of DMT die down and you can compose yourself.
And so on, little by little, you are welcome back to your self. And much as in the case of the skydiver for the next few hours pretty much ALL you can think about is what you went through. And you try to tell those around you, those who never left on this incredible voyage, what it was like. You summon details and all the adjectives within your grasp to explain so that they too can vicariously feel what just happened. But deep down you know your descriptive efforts fail to convey the sense, the rush, the abject terror!
