N,N-dimethyltryptamine, DMT, is an illegal, psychedelic compound found in the human body and at least ~60 species of plants, Sometimes called ‘the spirit molecule, and it can either be extracted or brewed into a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca. the main side effect of DMT is psychological. People want to take the substance because it provides intense auditory and visual hallucinations and an altered sense of space, body, and time. Users have reported shifts in time, visiting other dimensions, talking with aliens, complete changes in the perception of identity and reality, and life-altering experiences
Now in an effort to explain just a small percentage of the experience, I'm going to go to Terrance McKenna
McKenna first smoked DMT as an undergraduate at Berkeley in early 1967. He had experience with LSD—ingesting it "once a month or so"—and other psychedelics, but as he said in an interview in The Archaic Revival (1992):
It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so.
From 1967 to 1994, McKenna smoked DMT—an orange, crystalline, earwax-y substance that "smells vaguely of mothballs"—30 to 40 times. He described composites of his DMT trips in "Rap Dancing into the Third Millennium," "DMT Revelations," and "Time and Mind."
0:00. First toke. Colors brighten, edges sharpen, distant things gain clarity—"there is a sense as though all the air in the room has been sucked out."
0:10. Second toke. You close your eyes and "colors begin racing together, and it forms this mandalic, floral, slowly rotating thing"—"usually yellow-orange"—which McKenna called "the chrysanthemum." Then "you either break through it, or you require one more toke." ("The leather-lunged hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department.")
0:20. Third toke. The chrysanthemum parts. There's a sound of "a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of flame," and "an impression of transition." Then "it's as though there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling down."
0:40. You burst into this "place."
In one composite, at this point, McKenna said: "And language cannot describe it—accurately. Therefore I will inaccurately describe it. The rest is now lies." And later: "I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning that they're lies!" McKenna's awareness of and engagement with this aspect of DMT increases my interest in his DMT accounts. In one lecture, he said:
The reason it's so confounding is because its impact is on the language-forming capacity itself. So the reason it's so confounding is because the thing that is trying to look at the DMT is infected by it—by the process of inspection. So DMT does not provide an experience that you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some sort of hyper-dimensional inflation instantly, and then, you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can't be downloaded into as low-dimensional a language as English.
The place, or space, you've burst into—called "the dome" by some—seems to be underground, and is softly, indirectly lit. The walls are "crawling with geometric hallucinations, very brightly colored, very iridescent with deep sheens and very high, reflective surfaces—everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy." McKenna said:
But that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited—that the immediate impression as you break into it is there's a cheer. [...] You break into this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf-machines...made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. And they say, "Hooray! Welcome! You're here!" And in my case, "You send so many and you come so rarely!"
0:50. You're "appalled." You're thinking "Jesus H. Fucking Christ, what is this? What is it?" McKenna observed:
And the weird thing about DMT is it does not affect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call you—nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the world has been radically replaced—100 percent—it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? Is this the drug? Did we do it? Is this it?"
1:00. The elves, or "jeweled self-dribbling basketballs," come running forward. They're "singing, chanting, speaking in some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear, but what is far more important is that you can see it [which is] completely confounding!" And also, something is "going on" that over the years McKenna has come to call luv—"not 'light utility vehicle,' but love that is not like Eros or not like sexual attraction," something "almost like a physical thing," "a glue that pours out into this space."
1:10. Each "elf-machine creature" "elbows others aside, says, 'Look at this, look at this, take this, choose me!'" They "come toward you, and then—and you have to understand they don't have arms, so we're kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe it, but—what they do is they offer things to you." You realize what you're being shown—this "proliferation of elf gifts," or "celestial toys," which "seem somehow alive"—is "impossible." This "state of incredible frenzy" continues for about three minutes, during which the elves are saying:
Don't give way to wonder. Do not abandon yourself to amazement. Pay attention. Pay attention. Look at what we're doing. Look at what we're doing, and then do it. Do it!
4:10. Then—"and only 5 percent report this," McKenna noted—"everything stops and they wait, and you feel, like, a torch, a spark, lit in your belly, that begins to move up your esophagus." Then your mouth "flies open and this language-like stuff comes out." It's sound, but "what you're experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces, shading, colors, insets, jewels, and you are making something." The elves "go mad with joy."
4:40. "The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself, and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye." There's "a ripple through the system, and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart." (Once, "as the pull-away maneuver began, all the elves turned simultaneously and looked at" McKenna and said "déjà vu, déjà vu.") McKenna added:
And often it's very erotic, although I'm not sure if that's the word. But it's almost like sex is the surface of which this is the volume. And I'm a great fan of sex; I don't mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status.
5:00. "You're raving about it."
7:00. "You can't remember it." You say "this is the most amazing thing, this is the most amazing thing, this is—what am I talking about?" McKenna thought DMT "might have a role in dreaming," in part because "the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away—at the same speed." McKenna discussed this in an interview:
There is a self-erasing mechanism in it. I have the feeling that you find out something there that is so contra-intuitive that you literally cannot think of it sitting here. So as you go from there to here, there comes a moment where it slips below the surface of rational apprehensibility.
The experience of DMT was, to McKenna, "of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave." He said it was not a drug, but "something masquerading as a drug." The experience of it, he said, would be different for everyone, but "in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be." He provisionally concluded:
This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the "it's only a hallucination" thing—that horseshit is just passé. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud, haven't you heard?
Now it may sound as though the point of this drug is to "see or hear very odd things" but as with any psychedelic that really has nothing to do with what they're about, or at least just scratches the surface. As anyone who's taking psychedelics know, some of them have remarkable effects on your thought process and state of mind, more noticeably something like mushrooms. Which can literally make you get feelings and thoughts that help you come to terms with the universe and your role in it. Interestingly enough while dmt doesn't change the way you think, the experience itself is so odd and perspective shattering that it teaches you things in 5 minutes that could take a dedicated person 20 years to learn or understand and those lessons have to do with how your state of mind affects you, your environment and vice versa, also tends to reveal to people the fractal multi dimensional nature of the universe and the God self
I've done it 3 times in my life and the last time I did it, I experienced essentially every trope/archetype/ idea and image that my brain could produce if it had near infinite energy and near infinite time. Meaning I was seeing things appear in front of me and work in a way I didn't understand. It was as if my own brain was speaking every language of imagination into existence and changed from one idea to the next so rapidly that the second I saw something and began to try to comprehend it, it would transform into a compete other form. So for instance if you're hallucinating and see an apple in front of you suddenly grow twice as big, it's quite odd but ur able to register it. If that Apple turned itself inside out and planted a 3d seed of your soul in the cockpit of a spaceship inhabited by circus aliens.
And just as you saw this happen it instantly changes to something else equally ridiculous, well there's nothing you can really say or do but exclaim 'oh wowwwwwww' as many do'
Some people might ask what the value in such an experience as I've described could be. I think once you know that dmt is in almost everything, and is processed during dreams and released during death, and is completely harmless to the human body, it should at the very least peak your interest, and if you actually do it, you'll be allowing yourself the permission to change forever into any form you wish