At last, I have tried the legendary DMT, and I’ve come prepared to show you what it showed me, as filtered through my knowledge and experiences. I believe the DMT effect may not be ultra complex or as mysterious as it first seems. Warning: this post contains spoilers that may demystify what is thought to be the most mystic experience of all. If you wish not to slay the divine DMT mystery, then turn back. Joking aside, who knows whether this post has any truth at all. Everything said here is hypothetical. To tease, I think the DMT effect is produced as a side effect of a learning mechanism.
For those who’ve followed my gnostic journey, you know that I’m a fan of the hypothesis that psychedelics turn back time, restore the innocence and naivety of childhood, inducing a state much like the newly born live in. In essence, I had assumed that psychedelics may operate by disrupting our conditioned responses that guide our perception, feelings, and thoughts, leaving us to confront the world anew, as if we had never seen it before. What DMT showed me may change the theory a bit. More on that later.
First, let me translate what DMT was like in my own sad little insufficient words. My friend insisted I keep hitting the vape, repeatedly. I obeyed! That is, until I couldn’t because I was too freaked out to continue. Her voice began looping faintly. So did the walls and its beautiful fractally designs. The whole room transformed. Echoes continued to barrage me from all directions, accelerating uncontrollably, redesigning reality into symmetrical horror. I was scared. I wanted to stop feeling. To stop seeing. To stop everything and return to my comfortable bubble of life and my emptiness.
I couldn’t though. It was too late.
The world became 3D sculptures and magnificent patterns. I floated through an antigravity space with endless tunnels. Strange auras emanated from the curving walls. After landing, three purple cylindrical hallways paved the way before my… eyes? Glowing rings waved out on both sides of “me” (???).
The echoing sounds accelerated beyond the point of fusion. No longer were individual ticks of noise heard, but a newly formed pitch or tone was created from the duplicating sounds. This new pitch was wacky! Almost identical to grain delay. A grain delay is an echo device that allows you to speed up and change the pitch of the echoes, creating very strange and sometimes barely usable sounds. The echoes of DMT land would spiral out, creating bizarre atonal melodies. Four of these strings of echoes occurred in succession, each ascending seemingly 4 semitones apart. For those of you who have little musical knowledge, I am so sorry. This likely word salad to you.
Anyways. Back to the horrors.
This was it. I would die here. My brain was gone. I couldn’t remember what life was like but I knew I sorely longed for it. Even if my body remained after, I was already dead. This strange plastic space was how I would perceive life for the rest of eternity. I died.
But then I didn’t. Nope. Nevermind, I was returned to the room at the sight a kitten with purple triangle fur. The echoes persisted but less intensely. They began their fading exit.
The strangest part of this all, was that I think I understood what was happening. The new world that DMT opened to my mind was built from echoes of the senses. It’s like putting two microphones/speakers next to each other, creating that horrible feedback loop that screams out to the core of your soul. It’s like facing two mirrors towards each other, creating a portal to infinity.
It’s like visual cymatics.
It’s like auditory harmonics.
It’s like it fits into the Flicker theory, but somehow the mechanism doesn’t quite make as much sense to me now.
I don’t think the DMT experience is based on imagination. No. While it might be assessed and pigeonholed into fantastical imaginary frameworks, I think the experience itself is based on analog manipulation of sensory short-term memory. The effect may simply be a collage of echoes. Feedback loops of short-term sensory memories.
And all of this to help us learn. How? Noticing patterns and making associations relies on simultaneity of stimuli. The co-occurrence of events causes the two to be related. The usual time window for this may be set very short. On DMT, events begin to loop and persist. Thus, the time window is greater because now simultaneity expands. Events are longer or repeat themselves. The expansion seems immense. So much that echoes begin to echo themselves. Echoes of echoes of echoes, until you are blinded by a world manufactured by faint traces of contact with “reality”. Until everything is connected.
DMT may trigger a replay mechanism usually reserved for strange and unexpected events (novelty), so that we can resolve the unfamiliar by forming patterns with other unfamiliar events, associating and creating new meaning behind them. Then we can find the “cause” of the mysterious new experience. Have you ever experienced roller coasters or some similar sensory experience for the first time and then when you sleep that night the sensations loop in a dream-like way? I’ve experienced that with roller coasters and with the feeling of sand moving through my toes as the waves wax and wane at the beach. Maybe that’s related.
Now let’s look at cymatics.
Cymatics is a method of photography capturing water distorted by audio, essentially pictures of sound. The sound reflects off the walls, resulting in waves interacting with each other to form these pretty fractally patterns. The reflection of a wave on the wall is an echo. In a similar sense, sensory echoes on DMT and related psychedelics may result in interference patterns and fractals by a similar mechanism. With blast-off doses of DMT, one may create so many patterns and distortions that an entire new virtual world is generated. Then, our mind may try to interpret that created experience through our imagination or beliefs about what we’re seeing and feeling.
It’s better if you read the visual cymatics post because I don’t think I should reiterate all the same points and the read may help you understand what psychedelics do to our senses.
Perhaps the newly born must rely on vast simultaneity in order to construct a sense of the world. As we develop a world sculpture, we may pull away from pattern-realizing mechanisms, and move onto pattern-assuming mechanisms. I’ve often said that optical illusions are an example of pattern assuming or in other words, sensory auto-correct based on memories of correct past perceptions.
Eventually, all that’s left for us is a world of illusions. We remain blinded. Consumed by prophecies of the future (expectation). Of our doom, of our path to heaven, and so on. In regard to mental health, a lot of our pain and misery are guided by such illusions and prophecies. We know we will encounter more trauma, more pain, and more failure. Our tainted souls may be helped by the aide of these psychedelic substances, by relinquishing our connection to the past in favor of the present. To see a new future outside of the sculpture we find ourselves addicted to. We can leave behind our prisons of assumed “sanity”.
But what is life, really? What is sane? That’s something we can never know.
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