The Big and Dandy DMT thread - Next Phase

[Jabberwocky]

nice story delsyd! sounds fantastic!

All I have to add is 2CT7 +piracetam +DMT = WOW

When you're on t7, the DMT seems to come on a lot slower, but when it hits, WHOA!

Permiscuous Cosmic Love Orgy

 

[freespiritmind]

you felt the magic!!!

 

[drews_secret]

just look at all those crystals!!

Ok, so I looked at the pics, but I wanna know what it is...is it shards??
It kinda looked like rock candy, I hear others talking about smoking it..??

 

[e1evene1even]

Delsyd, your experience reminds of the plot of a Star Trek TNG episode I watched the other day called "The Inner Light". Basically Picard lives an entire other life in only 25 minutes, after being scanned by a probe.

The Enterprise-D is followed by a space probe. When the probe scans the ship, Picard staggers and is rendered unconscious.

He wakes to find himself being tended to by a woman, who tells him he has come out of a fever. She refers to him as Kamin, and claims to be his wife.

...On the bridge of the Enterprise, Dr. Crusher finds that the probe is transmitting a signal to Picard, and that he is experiencing dramatically increased neural activity.

...Many years later, Picard chides his fully grown daughter for placing scientific pursuits above the social. By now the drought has become serious enough to threaten all life on the planet.

The Enterprise tracks the probe's trail to its planet of origin, Kataan, a lifeless planet whose star went nova a millennium ago.

An old Picard discusses his adult son's career choices. He presents his findings about the planet's fate to the administrator, who by now is an old friend. However the administrator has been aware of the problem for the past two years, but the government chose not to inform the public. He assures Picard that despite the lack of spacefaring technology the government does have a plan to save some remnant of the society. His son calls him back to the house where his wife soon dies. Some years later, an ancient Picard interrupts his play with his grandson to watch a missile launch: the launch of the probe. His wife and old friend Batai appear as when he first saw them, and they tell him that the probe is a way for them to live on.

On the bridge, the transmission from the probe ceases and Picard wakes up, recalling distant memories of his life aboard the Enterprise. He can scarcely believe that only 25 minutes have passed in realtime.

Later, in his ready room, Riker gives Picard a small box that was found inside the probe and leaves him alone. Inside, Picard finds Kamin's flute, which he had gradually mastered over the years. Treasuring the memory of his life on Kataan, he adeptly plays a tune.

The plot of this episode is similar to that of the Japanese folktale, "The Dream of Akinosuke." In that story, a man named Akinosuke falls asleep while picnicking with friends under a tree. He awakes to find himself in a dream world, in which he marries and has children. After living in the dream world for many years, he leaves the dream world, finding himself back under the tree. He then learns from his friends that he has only been asleep for a short time. He eventually discovers that the kingdom he lived in was in fact a kingdom of ants living under the tree.

A dreamworld ant kingdom? Sounds like a trip report from the Strassman studies

 

[Youkai]

Youkai, thanks for that tek. ill be sure to try it next time as i get pretty poor yeilds with acid base extracts.

And now for a lil story:
So iv been using DMT for a while now always having great respect for the power of this entheogen though never truly experienceing what they call a "break through."
Last night we (my girlfriend and i) packed an unmeasured amount (but really big) of DMT into our "machine" and she went ahead and hit it. Aftre around 2-3 hits she became imobile and experienced her first break through trip on DMT.

Maybe she'll post something about it here in the future.

After that i took a couple hits but felt my usual low dose effects, apparently she had smoked most of it.

A couple hours later i decided i realy wanted to experience a high dose trip and so again we packed a really large amount of DMT into our machine.
I take a hit: usual effects from 1 hit
a another: still nothing im not familiar with
another: still the same
another: all of a sudden the visuals start getting very strong and i decide im good with the dose i got even though i was still very conscious of everything around me. In fact Im alot more lucid than i have ever been while smoking DMT. "this is awesome" i think.

I stare at my girlfriend and she startes turning into the most beautiful hindu women i have ever seen. I saw her become at least 10 different hindu women, godesses even. Evrytime she smiled, turned her head, closed her eyes she would become someone else. Each one prettier than the last.

Then things became strange. All of a sudden i didnt recognize my room, even though everything stil looked the same. As if i was seeing my same room but in a parallell dimension.
At this point i became a little scared.
Time had stopped existing and i was stuck in this trange land. I had been in there forever! Was my life before this just an illusion? a dream?
My girlfriend, parents, friends, experiences. All this had never existed. Where i am right now is real and im not sure if i like it. I get scared . Remembering that i had smoked DMT i look over to my girlfreind and ask how long its been. "3 minutes" she says. Oh my fucking god, i just lived an entire lifetime in a parralell dimesion yet in this "real" life it was only 3 minutes. This scares me even more. I start to think im not going to come down which reinforces my belief that "real life" was just an illusion.
"Will i be okay" i ask? She says "yes" though she has a worried look on her face which makes me feel that she is lying and i am indeed stuck in this new dimension.
"Are you ok babe?" she asks
im not really able to answer as i am trying to understand whats happening to me. Everything in my room took on it own character. gained life.
The tapestry in front of me has smiling suns on it, all the suns have strange smirks and i feel like they are malicious beings playing a joke on me. They come off the tapestry and move around the room playing with my head. I know pictures cant come off the tapestry yet here they are doing it and it looks as realistic as this computer screen infront of me right now.
The door has taken on a personality as well. It keeps coming out at me but when i look at it it goe back to its place.
That sneaky door, its fucking with my head, making this timeless dimension so hard to understand.
Even more things move, shift, change, disapper, reappear. Too much is happening in visual field yet none of really seems odd to me. Thats how thing s are in this strange new land. i just need to try to understand it, accpet it, and live with it. Because im stuck here.

Suddenly the fear startes to fade into the background. Am i getting used to living in this strange land? "Great," i think .
then the patterns on the wall start to slowly disappear. My girlfriend is herself again instead of hindu women.

"im back!!!!"
A great euphoria washes over me. I have never been so happy to be myself, so happy to be back to this real life.

My girl asks me wht happened, im not able to explain, just telling her little bits and peices in between bursts of laughter and tears.

The dmt eventually completely fades and i start trying to integrate the experience. This "real life" still feels different to me. I had just visited a place that was just as real but i had never been aware of it. Even today, the next day, i feel like i have visited a parrallel universe. a place as real as the one im living in now.
i know it sounds a little crazy, but i believe it.

Anyway, so much more happened that i can not put into words, this language didnt exist in the place i visited. The visuals were more than visuals, they were the reality of the place that i went to.

Well, that was by far the strongest DMT experience i have ever had and now i cant wait to visit that land again, this time i feel i wont feel the fear i felt the first time as i am more familiar with it now.

Well i hope you all enjoyed this story, i dont usually write about my trips but this was different than anything i have experienced in my 100+ trips (on over two dozen psychedleics) before this.

I wish everyyone happy journeys with this oh so wonderful, cosmic, tool-key-entheogen-drug-LOVE.

-D

Dude, that basicly what breaking through is. The land of aliens and elves is just a figment of your imagination. DMT true power is showing you the ehaven in which you constantly live in but are too ignorant to experience.

I smoked some real nice extra clean DMT today at the river and it was so freaking beautiful!!! This DMt is so clean that by the time I left the river it had turned pink, only clear/white DMt will turn pink after slightly turning to wax.

 

[Youkai]

Oh yeah, opiates and DMt synergise VERY well.

 

[psood0nym]

Then things became strange. All of a sudden i didnt recognize my room, even though everything stil looked the same. As if i was seeing my same room but in a parallell dimension.
At this point i became a little scared.
Time had stopped existing and i was stuck in this trange land. I had been in there forever! Was my life before this just an illusion? a dream?
My girlfriend, parents, friends, experiences. All this had never existed. Where i am right now is real and im not sure if i like it. I get scared . Remembering that i had smoked DMT i look over to my girlfreind and ask how long its been. "3 minutes" she says. Oh my fucking god, i just lived an entire lifetime in a parralell dimesion yet in this "real" life it was only 3 minutes. This scares me even more. I start to think im not going to come down which reinforces my belief that "real life" was just an illusion.
"

Delsyd :

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t doubt the power of psychedelics to create valid thought forms unattainable by any other means, nor do I doubt their ability to offer insights and life changing experiences, only our ability to interpret those experiences accurately. Be wary of believing psychedelics offer access to actually existing physical or metaphysical realities. This is one of the first steps down a slippery, flaky slope.

Ask yourself what reason you have to believe you lived an entire lifetime in this other, actually existing, reality. Our senses of time and identity leave no breadcrumb trail through time, they are not metaphysically accumulative, but rather they are qualities or impressions constantly reconstructed and projected onto our experience of the moment. They are patterns re-constructible in just moments. With the help of lucid dreamers, experiments have verified our sense of time in dreams is the same as it is in waking life. When people feel that days have past in a single night of dreaming it is because the dream itself is constructed as a montage, and our past sense of having lived through many days (derived from actually doing so in the past), is superimposed over that montage (or something similar to this).

The only way to know how much time has really past, and what you’ve actually gone through is through recall of content. If, for example, in a few minutes of a psychedelic experience, you read a book that subjectively took twenty hours, you should be able to recount character names, dialogue, plot structure, details, etc., easily, and form it into a coherent retelling of a story whose style and scope is that of a book that took twenty hours to read. Have you retained this level of content memory from the trip? No? Is it because this other life was really too fantastic to remember, or was it because you experienced the feeling of content rather than the content itself? To believe in living other complete lives inside the scope of seconds is to believe in the supernatural, which albeit may exist, but once you believe in it enthusiastically your tendency to fallaciously ascribe it greater and greater influence in your life and in the world, to the detriment of your understanding, increases.

You did experience another reality, but it was most likely another, extraordinarily intense and compelling, mental reality. This reality was so unrecognizable and complete because you literally never had experienced this qualitatively distinct thought pattern before. Not being accustomed to something so intense and novel, you subconsciously gathered grand feelings and sweeping adjectives from your real life and, understandably, applied them to your judgment and impression of what was happening in this DMT world.

I don’t mean to pass final judgment on what, after all, was your experience, or to imply that the psychological interpretation is the only one possible, just that it’s the most probable. Your experience was truly extraordinary, the beauty and love you experienced were real, and you are right to, and should, carry them into your life. I offer the alternate interpretation because I believe we benefit most from these drugs when we interpret them cautiously, and so strive to best comprehend what is actually happening, and not overlook insights of potential importance because of our tendancy to accidentally leap over them in prematurely concluding that the psychedelic experience is a supernatural one.

-psood0nym

 

[swilow]

The land of aliens and elves is just a figment of your imagination. DMT true power is showing you the ehaven in which you constantly live in but are too ignorant to experience.

It seems that physics suggest all of this- this universe- is one and the same with the mind, and therefore a figment of our imigaination (and we are a figment of its, just as we are it, and it is us- the Universe I mean ), so I don't think it matters whether the elves ar not real- because they both are (if I assume this computer in front of me is) and not (if I assume the computer is nothing but vibrating waves coaelscing into form). I tend to think that, against all odds (lol, not really) they ARE real in their own way.

 

[*Love*Lite*]

Break through DMT experience (30-50 mg.?)

Last night we (my girlfriend and i) packed an unmeasured amount (but really big) of DMT into our "machine" and she went ahead and hit it. Aftre around 2-3 hits she became imobile and experienced her first break through trip on DMT.

Maybe she'll post something about it here in the future.

Here it is :

This weekend felt right for a break through trip so my boyfriend and I packed up a hefty bowl of DMT into the machine that we had made and experimented with the week before. I hit the bowl first, getting a massive hit, I held it in until my lungs were going to burst. I went in for a 2nd hit, this time getting an equally large hit. Normally I cannot take more than 2 hits but I went in for the third and got a decent hit this time as well.

I knew something big was about to happen as soon as I expelled my third hit, I lay back and closed my eyes. The music played with my closed eye visuals as it usually does, but then everything went black and then a sudden burst of white light appeared. I was looking down at myself lying on the bed from very high up above everything. It was if my mental self was floating in space, where neither time nor space existed, looking down upon my physical self as it actually was.

It is very hard to put into words what happened next.

“I” was floating in a place where “I” was infinite possibilities, everything and nothing was possible. I was not scared. Nothing existed but my mind in a vast ocean or abyss of ideas and hope and love and nothingness all at the same time.

I became aware of a being in front of me. It beckoned me to follow, it was playful and mysterious at the same time. It was not a human; it was a misty representation of a small being. It never fully revealed itself to me but I knew it was there. It appeared out of water, out of air, or of smoke and would beckon me to follow it, show me where to go, and then vanish all together.

Existing in this manner was the most joyful, religious, loving, happy, beautiful experience I have ever felt. I knew when the being would appear before it appeared, we were communicating on a non-verbal level, but communicating non the less. I was overwhelmed, forgot that I had taken DMT, forgot that I even existed outside of this place.

A sudden gasp of breath from my body grounded me a bit, I opened my eyes, saw my boyfriend sitting beside me, remembered that I was tripping and then before I knew it I had closed my eyes and was transported back to the world that the DMT had created.

The world began to vanish and return to musical rhythmic designs behind closed eyes. I opened my eyes and came down as usual, trying to wrap my mind around what had just happened. I felt reborn. I realized I was crying, in fact what had just happened led to me involuntarily crying for the next hour or so.

I felt that what I experienced is life after death, there was no fear, no war, no hurting, just infinite possibilities and my soul floating around, mingling with god or an entity or maybe just myself. DMT is amazing. LOVE. LIGHT. DMT.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Sounds amazing! Thank you for sharing with us!

peace and love,
S_S

 

[freespiritmind]

Delsyd, your experience reminds of the plot of a Star Trek TNG episode I watched the other day called "The Inner Light". Basically Picard lives an entire other life in only 25 minutes, after being scanned by a probe.

WOW! That certainly sounds familiar

Dude, that basicly what breaking through is. The land of aliens and elves is just a figment of your imagination. DMT true power is showing you the ehaven in which you constantly live in but are too ignorant to experience.

do we ACTUALLY know this? or are you telling yourself this because it's more sane

I'm curious if there is a way (probably not, but maybe) that we can bring back this feeling of infinity we experience into this reality. Possibly through dance/other magick?

 

[e1evene1even]

A few quotes from "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" that I thought people would enjoy.

Although the brain denies access to most drugs and chemicals, it takes a particular and remarkable fancy to DMT. It is not stretching the truth to suggest that the brain "hungers" for it.

...

In a way, DMT is "brain food," treated in a manner similar to how the brain handles glucose, its precious fuel source. It is part of a "high turnover" system: quick in, quick used. The brain actively transports DMT across its defense system and just as rapidly breaks it down. It is as if DMT is necessary for maintaining normal brain function. It is only when levels get too high for "normal" function that we start undergoing unusual experiences.

If DMT is in fact "brain food" and the brain "hungers" for it, my brain should reward me with positive reinforcing experiences, and I will give it more DMT.

 

[Xorkoth]

That experience report just made me realize how badly I need to make a machine and break through myself for the first time.

If DMT is in fact "brain food" and the brain "hungers" for it, my brain should reward me with positive reinforcing experiences, and I will give it more DMT.

I think it might actually do that in a way.

 

[Youkai]

WOW! That certainly sounds familiar



do we ACTUALLY know this? or are you telling yourself this because it's more sane

You obviously skip over my posts if you think I ever think "more sane" I just know Iv smoekd DMT way over a hundred times and haev only seen elves/aliens when I was looking for them, its called interpitation. But look at the sorces in which you elarnt about elves and aliens and see how that influenced the experience.


Im jsut saying, DMt is alot mroe then just elevs and aliens, its something SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much mroe meaningful.

 

[massiveinminiature]

Hate the taste very much BUT its worth sufferring especially when you break through !!! %)

No elves nor aliens for me though, however I did once have a wizard reach out his hand wanting me to take it though ! %)

 

[e1evene1even]

[mystical meanderings]

The first time I took ayahuasca I had a vision showing me that DMT containing plants are "littered" around the earth on purpose as a way for humans to access 'the divine'. They are the literal manifestation of the perennial philosophy. Although it can be suppressed and forgotten it will always be rediscovered.

In the last 50 years, since around the time Seeking the Magic Mushroom was first published in Time Magazine (1957) and the psychoactive effects of DMT were first studied (mid-1950's), the Western world is rediscovering the potential and promise of these amazing compounds. I've said it many times, but DMT is the neuro-transmitter of the future.

In the not-to-distant future modern science may very well come to the same conclusion as the ancient shamans; DMT is a much more effective vehicle for exploring space and time than strapping tonnes of metal and explosives to one's ass.

The reason for the semi-hidden nature of this key to the doors of perception, is so that only those that explicitly seek these experiences will find them. To force the DMT experience on someone, would be a violation of their 'free will' and auto-determinism which are some of the most important rules of "the cosmic game" as Grof calls it.


[/mystical meanderings]

 

[e1evene1even]

Something of interest from the links Youkai posted:

I have found that pretreatment with LSD and
subsequent ingestion of DMT works very well in this regard
and produces an impressive synergistic effect. For example,
200 ug of LSD followed by 60 mg DMT HCl or 80 mg DMT
fumarate IM in the tenth hour works very well. Or simply
smoke the DMT base until you disappear. No Cannabis.
All of the psychedelics are curing and purifying agents. What
happens with this combination is that by the time you reach
the tenth hour of an LSD trip, most of the pushing through
the envelope and inner cleansing has happened. LSD is not
as acutely dramatic as DMT is. It lasts so long though, that
the inner cleansing can happen. When this stage is reached,
then you can approach the DMT experience more efficiently
and access deeper levels of understanding and realization
without wasting valuable DMT clock time on gross cleanouts.
IM injection need not be the only route; smoking the
DMT can work quite well also. Three or four good tokes will
usually do the trick. If you do it in the eighth or tenth hour of
your acid trip, you can move right into the DMT levels as I
have experienced them.

^ This makes a lot of sense to me.

 

[Dondante]

^^That's some great info there. LSD can serve as an excellent primer for a seamless transition into breakthrough DMT levels. It not only saved me from initial disorientation, but also made it 100% anxiety free. Instead of feeling the world ripped apart, it gently dissolves into the background.

I have a report from a few months ago that I never quite finished on my 1st ++++ experience with 250 mcg LSD and successive IV injections of 15, 20, and 25 mg DMT. I'll finish it someday.

 

[adrian89987]

That experience report just made me realize how badly I need to make a machine and break through myself for the first time.

I'd definitely recommend it
I was having an extremely hard time breaking through with just a lightbulb vap I had made
first time trying the machine I got way further than I had ever been

 

[e1evene1even]

a bunch of interesting DMT information here

I found James Kent's skeptical view of DMT a good counter-balancing opinion.

NSFW:

From: James Kent
Sent: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 02:51:05 -0700
Subject: DMT Elves

Hey Clifford,

James Kent here, I run the website http://tripzine.com. I published a psychedelic magazine for many years, and a friend recently pointed me to your article on DMT, Moses and Aliens. Since you asked people to voice their opinion I shall...

I have done DMT quite a bit, have interviewed and spent time with the late Terence McKenna, am friends with Rick Strassman, and have studied this issue very closely for the past fifteen years. And though I have not published the results of all my research (yet), I would like to share with you some of my conclusions concerning DMT and the dramatic phenomena it produces.

In short, I do not believe DMT is a gateway to an alternate dimension, nor does it provide contact with elves and alien entities. Yes, DMT produces a vivid other-worldly landscape when ingested, often including elves, aliens, insects, snakes, jaguars, etc. This is true for the majority of people who try it. Some people do not have such vivid reactions, but many do. Although this may appear at first glance to be "shocking," it is actually no more shocking then the fact that most people dream at night, or that most people see geometric patterns when they close their eyes and press against their eyeballs (pressure phosphenes). The only difference between dreams, phosphenes, and DMT visuals is that DMT is illegal and very hard to come by, so most people never have the opportunity to experience it. If we could all hold our breath for a minute and produce vivid hallucinations of alien landscapes it would seem downright mundane, a mere curiosity of the human condition. However, since this particular alien landscape is produced by a specific rare substance (DMT), people seem to think it is akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe when they actually get their hands on it and try it.

Now don't get me wrong, DMT is stunning in its effect, no doubt. But, like anything, when you do it many times the magic tends to wear off and reveal itself for what it is, an abberation of the brain's perceptual mechanics. To illustrate this I would like to offer the following observations:

1. DMT acts primarily at the 5-HT2A receptor, which is where all hallucinogenic tryptamines work their visual magic. Without going into all the details here, let's just assume for a moment that a molecule with the proper shape acting at the 5-HT2A sites can significantly disrupt or enhance visual sensory processing. If this is the case, then dumping DMT into the perceptual wetworks is akin to messing with the logic that produces the display on the monitor you are looking at right now. Any programmer can tell you that a single line of code consisting of only a few characters can drastically alter the way your screen presents the data coming from your video card. It can make the screen flicker, blink, warp, twist, or fall into infinitely recursive fractalline chaos. If that happens is your monitor now displaying an "alternate reality" or "parallel dimension"? No, it is not. It is simply taking the same old data and processing it with a new factor in the base algorithm. Small tweak, dramatic results. Since the sensory processing system is so delicate, any chemical perturbation can cause it to fall into chaos, and as we all know chaos does not produce random noise, it produces some pretty damn trippy patterns.

2. The sensation of seeing aliens, elves, or being in the presence of God(s) is not unique to DMT users. Otherwise sane people who have never tried DMT report these sensations all the time, and it is generally treated as a sign of psychosis. However, recent research has shown that by stimulating parts of the temporal lobe you can reliably reproduce the feeling of being in the presence of God (also known as "seeing the light" or having a "religious epiphany"). It is an innate human sensation (just like the feeling that "I'm being watched" is an innate human sensation) we just don't catalog it as such because it is relatively rare, happening perhaps only once in a lifetime to those who do not artificially stimulate themselves, perhaps never in a lifetime. Some people have very dramatic religious epiphanies with angels and demons and all form of cherubim marching through with horns and such with no drugs whatsoever, and though it is a common event we generally treat it as a psychological abberation (though back in the day it was the stuff prophets were made of). Since this kind of religious vision phenomena is something our brains can already do on their own, the fact that a substance like DMT can reproduce this phenomena is not much of a stretch.

3. The archetypal DMT "entities" are pretty well categorized, with most people seeing elves or aliens or fairies or angels or some kind of loopy little spirits that dance about and tell riddles. Sometimes it is a spirit-animal like a jaguar or a snake, sometimes it is none of the above and goes totally off the map. But getting back to the elf thing (which is what many people find to be the most curious aspect), I initially found it very surprising to be confronted by elves in my DMT experiences (and on psilocybe mushrooms as well), and did indeed perceive them as externalized disencarnate beings, even managing to carry on rudimentary conversations of sorts. However, the more I experimented with the substance the more I found that the "elves" were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind would wander through all sorts of magnificient and amazing creations, but the times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some non-transient feature that would comfirm at least a rudimentary "autonomous existence" beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream fades. So it is with the elves. When you try to shine a light of reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

4. Which brings me to my last point. Psychedelics in general have an amazing capacity to activate the mind's eye, or what I call the imaginal workspace. In our day-to-day lives we have two active areas that are processing our perception of reality. The first is the primary workspace where all our sense data is compiled in our pre-frontal cortex to give us our waking picture of reality. The second is the imaginal workspace, where we can think about abstract thoughts or visualize the contents of our cupboards from memory (or whatever). The imaginal workspace is generally running in the background, helping us plan our actions by visualizing them in advance (like driving to the grocery store for instance. We visualize the store, plan a route, and then go). All the while our primary workspace is taking up most of our attention. This balance flips, however, when we are caught in deep abstract thinking, like daydreaming or trying to solve a difficult problem. And when we sleep the primary workspace is actually taken-over by the imaginal workspace to process all the backlogged data that was set aside during the waking day. When this happens we dream. Our primary workspace is filled with imaginal data, and suddenly we are immersed in an imaginal reality that looks and feels just as solid as waking reality because it is being processed by the same high-end gear that we use to processess waking reality. The only difference between being awake and dreaming is the origin of the data being processed in the primary workspace. When you are awake you are processing external sense data in the primary workspace. When you are dreaming you are processing internal (imaginal) data in the primary workspace. Now I have done many many experiments with lucid dreaming and self-induced hypnogogic states and I can tell you that the switch from external to internal data sources feeding into the primary workspace (and vice-versa) happens in a split second. It is too quick to notice unless you are waiting and watching very carefully for the hand-off. One second you are awake and listening to the faucet drip, the next second you are wandering through a dream parking lot searching for your car. If you catch yourself and wake back up again you are back to the drip-drip-drip of the faucet. Close your eyes and the drips fade away and you are back in the dream lot (or wherever). So, knowing this, it is not much of a stretch to assume that psychedelics play some kind of role in this hand-off between sensory and imaginal data flowing into our primary workspace, muddying up the selective inputs so that everything is crashing in at once, making it impossible to distiguish what is real and what is imaginal until the drug wears off. Concrete psychedelic visuals may be nothing more than chaotic sense data overlapped with images created from waking dreams.

So, with all of this in mind the one question remains: Why is the alien/elf archetype so common to the DMT experience? The only answer I have is that we humans must have some kind of innate evolutionary wetworking that forces us to latch onto any piece of anthropomorphic data that pops up in otherwise random sensory data, such as spotting a face peering out from behind the bushes, or spotting another human form hiding in the tall grass. The evolutionary advantage of such a trait is obvious, and in standard Rorschach tests even the most ambiguous blobs are found to look like faces or people no matter what culture the observer is from. Now, given the amazing swirling kaliedescopic imagery produced in the typical DMT trip, it is inevitable that anthropomorphic shapes will emerge and then express themselves in even greater detail as the mind latches onto them and "dreams" them into focus. With the imaginal workflow kicked into high gear, it is not surprising that these emergent anthropomorphic entities can then speak to us, revealing shocking details from our own subconscious in a conversational stream of visual theater. Given all of this, in a nutshell, the case for automous disencarnate DMT entities is closed. All that is needed to produce them is our own over-activated imagination, and thus Occam's razor wipes them right off the table and into the fairy-dust bin.

In conclusion I would just like to mention a couple more things. The visions produced by DMT are not solely elfs and alien entities. A wide variety of archetypes and just plain-old whacked-out stoner shit creeps into the mix. It is highly individual and in many cases is heavily dependent on set and setting. This fact alone (more than anything else) leads me to believe that the DMT enitites are mere figments. If, for example, everyone always saw talking penguins and only talking penguins while high on DMT, that would be much harder to explain and much more mysterious. The fact that DMT "consciousness" reveals itself in so many forms tells me that the "messenger" -- be it elf, alien, jaguar, or whatever -- is basically arbitrary within the context of the patterns and

archetypes our minds are generally trained to pick out of random noise. However (and this is the good part), the really interesting thing about DMT experiences is not the elves (messengers) themselves, but what it is they are saying (the message). And when you get to the heart of what the typical DMT message is, it is usually something about the environment or living systems or the vast plant consciousness that penetrates our world. The "Gaia consciousness" that infuses the experience is undeniable, and what to make of that I don't know, other than to entertain the possibility that this ancient plant consciousness actually exists and is attempting to make itself known through the DMT-enlightened mammal brain. If so, then this is the real discovery of the DMT experience, and this is the topic that should be looked at more closely. In the context of DMT being a two-way radio for plant-human communication, the "elves" themselves are nothing more than a cartoonish interface for the exchange of information.

Whoah dude, that's heavy.

Thanks for reading all the way through. If you're interested in doing an interview for our website I'd love to set something up.

Peace out,

James Kent
http://tripzine.com